"She alone has the right to kill me," he would say; "I have injured her so deeply! She hates me, let her take her revenge! Don't I see her every moment, at the foot of my bed, in her new lover's arms? Come, Thérèse, come, I say; I am thirsty; pour out the poison for me." Thérèse would, thereupon, pour out for him tranquillity and slumber. After several days of continued frantic excitement, which the doctors thought that he could not endure, and which they took note of as an abnormal fact, Laurent suddenly became calm and lay inert, prostrated, in a sort of stupor, but saved. He was so weak that they had to feed him, without his knowledge, and in such infinitesimal quantities in order to relieve his stomach of all labor of digestion, that Thérèse felt that she ought not to leave him for an instant. Palmer tried to induce her to take some rest by giving her his word of honor to take her place by the invalid's side; but she refused, feeling that no human power was secure against the surprise of sleep, and that, since by a sort of miracle she was always on the alert when the time came to put the spoon to the patient's lips, and was never overcome by fatigue, God had entrusted to her, and to no other, the duty of saving that fragile existence. And so it was, in truth, and she saved him. If medical science, however enlightened it may be, proves inadequate in desperate cases, it is very often because it is impossible to carry out the treatment with absolute exactness. No one knows what disturbance a moment of craving or a moment of surfeit may cause in a life that is trembling in the balance; and the miracle lacking to save the dying man is often nothing more than placidity, persistence, and punctuality on the part of his nurses. At last, Laurent awoke one morning as if from a lethargic sleep, seemed surprised to see Thérèse at his right and Palmer at his left, offered each of them a hand, and asked them where he was and how he came there. They deceived him a long while as to the length and severity of his illness, for he was deeply distressed when he saw how weak and emaciated he was. The first time that he looked in the glass he was frightened by his own image. In the early days of his convalescence he asked for Thérèse. He was told that she was asleep. He was greatly surprised. "So she has become a genuine Italian woman, has she," he said, "that she sleeps in the day-time?" Thérèse slept twenty-four hours without a break. Nature reasserted itself as soon as anxiety vanished. Little by little, Laurent learned how devoted she had been to him, and he detected on her face the traces of excessive fatigue following on the heels of excessive grief. As he was still too weak to give his mind to anything, Thérèse installed herself by his side, sometimes reading to him, sometimes playing cards with him to amuse him, sometimes taking him to drive. Palmer was always with them.