His nurse not long before had made her last visit for the night, and, seeing him lying so still supposed, like Madge, that he was asleep, and had gone back to the dressing-room next door, to go to bed herself. His progress during the day had been most satisfactory, the feverishness had almost gone, and the doctor, when the wounds were dressed that afternoon, had been amazed to see how rapidly and well the processes of healing were going on. Certainly there was no lack of vitality or recuperative power in his patient, nor in the keenness and utter despair of his mental suffering was vitality absent. That same vitality coloured and suffused that; he saw it all with the hideous vividness of an imaginative nature. Doubt and uncertainty, however, here were worse than the worst that the truth could hold for him, and he called to the nurse, who came at once. "What is it, Mr. Dundas?" she asked. "I hoped you were asleep. You are not in pain?" "No, not in pain. But I can't sleep. I want to ask you two or three questions. Pray answer them: I sha'n't sleep till you do." She did not speak, half-guessing what was coming. "I want to know this, first of all," he said, speaking quite quietly. "What shall I look like when these things are healed, when the bandages come off?" Nurse James was essentially a truthful woman, but she did not hesitate about her reply. There are times when no decent person would hesitate about telling a lie, the bigger the better. She laughed. "Well, I never!" she said. "And have you brought me from my bed just to ask that! I never heard such a thing. Why, you will look as you always have looked, Mr. Dundas, but your eyelids will be shut." The good, kind woman suddenly felt that the ease with which all this came to her was almost appalling. She was a glorious liar, and had never known it till now. "Why, bless you," she went on, "your wife was in here when your face was dressed to-day, and--you were still under morphia, you know, and did not know she was there--and she said to Dr. Inglis: 'Why, he only looks as if he was asleep.'" "She has seen me, then?" asked Evelyn eagerly. "She has seen my face?" "Why, of course, and she bent and kissed it, just as your wife should do. There's a brave woman now. Is that all, sir?" Evelyn gave one great sigh of relief. "Yes, nurse," he said. "I am sorry I disturbed you. Yet I assure you it was worth while. I can't tell you how you have relieved me. I thought--oh, my God! it is not hell after all." She arranged the bedclothes about him, and though she had been so glib, she could not now speak at once. "There, then; you'll go to sleep, won't you, now you know that," she said. "But to think of you worrying here all these hours!"