While they wondered about her in St. Pierre, while her name ran like a little germ of gossip spreading contagion from lip to lip in St. Pierre, she sat most of the time in the hospital, in the chair beside Gregory’s bed, touching his hot, tense wrist with the coolness of her fingers--she sat outside his room in the recess of the bay windows on a curved window seat and watched people come and go--and once in a while she slipped into the hospital library and got hold of a book on pregnancy which fascinated her. Skillfully manipulated conversation with the nurse had given her enough information so that she had been able to control a great part of her own present liability to sickness and she felt better than she had for several weeks. Three days after her arrival Gregory came successfully through the first crisis of his illness. Freda walked on air the next day. The doctor was cheerful and jocose. “We’ll have that young Irishman of yours out of the woods in ten days,” he said to Freda, and she had no doubt of it. The difficulty was not in the progress of the disease but in Gregory’s own debility. He was not so well a few days later. The doctor talked gravely of exhaustion and Freda picked up from the reluctant nurse that exhaustion during the third week was dangerous--that one might die because of it. For the first time she was fearful. Here was nothing you could combat for him. Here was a slow slipping away. He did not often talk now. Almost all the time he lay, incredibly thin, mournfully haggard against his pillow, too tired even for Freda to call back. She thought about death. One day she passed a room in which a man was dying. She heard the raucous gasp from the filling lungs and trembled. They brought a priest. She wondered. If Gregory should die, would he too have a priest to guide him out? She supposed that usually you sent for a minister or priest. A month before the mere suggestion that a soul needed ushering into immortality would have seemed absurd to her healthy pagan young mind, but now, with the severing of the thread so possible, with the limits of the unknown receding even while they grew close she wondered. Gregory was not formally religious but in his poems he had seemed so conscious of God. “Most poets write of women--but you write only of God and Ireland.” So she had said to him, she remembered, and he had answered. “I shall write of woman now, dear heart.” She went softly to his door. No change. Well, she should go to the hotel for an hour--But the nurse stopped her. “Mrs. Macmillan, he is not so well. The doctor thinks these next twelve hours will be the worst. If you wish to leave I think it will be all right. If not, I can see that you get a supper tray and if he is better in the night you can take my cot.” Freda felt a strange chill rushing over her. “I’ll stay.” She looked at Gregory. “Worse? He looks just the same.” “He is weaker--”