"He would not give up until Friday, but I made him go to bed then. The next day I feared his lungs were involved--he did not wish me to send for you." Emily was blinking back her tears. "But I thought it best. He will improve now, I am confident, and if we can control the pulmonary difficulty, I am sure of it." She had turned and hastily gathering her skirts, ran up the stairs. She hesitated a moment in the doorway of his room, and by the dim light of the tiny star of gas saw the outlines of the form under the white counterpane. She fluttered across to the bed, and sank softly beside him. She laid her hand on his hot dry brow. "Father--I've come." The old man stirred and tried to turn his head. "I'm glad," he said. "It was a long ways." "I'm going to nurse you, and make you well," she said with a cheer in her voice of which her heart was void. The doctor pleaded for a trained nurse, but Emily, with the old-fashioned prejudice of women, indignantly refused, as though the mere idea involved some reflection upon her own powers, and her own constancy. For a week she watched by his side, and waited on him, taking his temperature hourly, and keeping a clinical chart like those she had seen in the hospitals, in the old days of her charities, determined that the lack of a trained nurse should not be felt. And then the congestion in his lungs passed, he breathed easily once more, his fever broke, and he lay, weak and faint, but smiling at her. XXIII Harkness gained steadily for a week, and then he began to grow restless and intractable. His whims and exactions exhausted Emily's strength, and when he could think of nothing else for her to do, he at last demanded that she read to him, and she had to settle to this labor, though her spirits wholly lacked that sense of leisure and repose so necessary to the enjoyment of such a task. He chose his old favorite, Scott, and for hours each afternoon, until the early twilight gathered in the room, she read to him from the novels he had loved so long. It was a test of her devotion, for she had long since outgrown Scott, as she had been fond of declaring, but he would not hear to Howells, nor Meredith, nor Hardy, nor any of the moderns. One afternoon the doctor entered the room in the midst of the reading. He heard Emily's low, placid voice as he noiselessly approached the room upstairs where his patient lay: "'At length the Norman received a blow which, though its force was partly parried by his shield, for otherwise nevermore would De Bracy have again moved limb, descended yet with such violence on his crest that he measured his length on the paved floor.'" Emily closed the book upon her finger as he entered and stood just inside the door with the smell of the cold air and his own cigar upon him, but her father reared himself on his elbow, and, shaking his tousled gray head, said: "We're just storming a castle, Doc. You sit down and wait, and then I'll attend to you." The doctor smiled.