He turned back at once, and eagerly, desiring, he said, a few minutes’ conversation. “I cannot well speak to you with your people and those women always about.” “I am afraid, then,” said Sir Robert, “you have something very serious to say.” “Maybe--and maybe not. In the first place there are indications this morning of a change--we will hope for the better. The pulse has fallen. There’s been a little natural sleep. I would say in an ordinary subject, and with no complications, that perhaps, though we must not just speak so confidently at the first moment, the turn had taken place.” “I’m delighted to hear it!” cried Sir Robert. It was really so great a relief to him that he put out his hand in sudden cordiality. “I will never forget my obligations to you, Macalister. You have given me the greatest relief. When the turn has really come, there is nothing, I’ve always heard, but great care wanted--care and good food and good air.” “That was just what I wanted to speak to you about, Sir Robert,” said the doctor, with one of those little unnecessary coughs that mean mischief. “Good air there is--she could not have better; and good food, for I’ve always heard your housekeeper is great on that; and good nursing--well, yon woman, that is, your niece’s maid, Bauby or Beenie, or whatever they call her, is little more than a fool, but she’s a good-hearted idiot, and sticks to what she’s told--when there’s nobody to tell her different. So we may say there’s good care. But when that’s said, though it’s a great deal, every thing is not said.” “Ay,” said Sir Robert, “and what may there be beyond that?” He had become suspicious after his experiences, though it did not seem possible that from such a quarter there should come any second attack. “I’m very diffident,” said the doctor in his strong Northern accent, with his ruddy, weather-beaten countenance cast down in his embarrassment, “of mentioning any thing that’s not what ye might call strictly professional, or taking advantage of a medical man’s poseetion. But when a man has a bit tender creature to deal with, like a flower, and that has just come through a terrible illness, the grand thing to ask will be, Sir Robert, not if she has good food and good nursing, which is what is wanted in most cases, but just something far more hard to come by--if she’s wanting to live----” “Wanting to live!” cried Sir Robert. “What nonsense are you speaking? A girl of that age!” “It’s just precisely that age that fashes me. Older folk have got more used to it: living’s a habit with the like of us. We just find we must go on, whatever happens; but a young lass is made up of fancies and veesions. She says to herself: ‘I would like better a bonnie green turf in the kirkyard than all this fighting and striving,’ and just fades away because she has no will to take things up again. I’ve seen cases like that before now.”