The night wore on, and Miss Marilla wrought with happy heart and willing hands. She was doing something for somebody who really needed it, and who for the time being had no one else to do for him. He was hers exclusively to be served this night. It was years since she had had anybody of her own to care for, and she luxuriated in the service. Every hour she slipped up to feel his forehead, listen to his breathing, and give him his medicine, and then slipped down to the kitchen again to her ironing. Garment by garment the soldier’s meagre outfit came from the steaming suds, was conveyed to the kitchen, where it hung on an improvised line over the range, and got itself dry enough to be ironed and patched. It was a work of love, and therefore it was done perfectly. When morning dawned the soldier’s outfit, thoroughly renovated and pressed almost beyond recognition, lay on a chair by the spare-room window, and Miss Marilla in her dark-blue serge morning-dress lay tidily down on the outside of her bed to take “forty winks.” But even then she could hardly get to sleep, she was so excited thinking about her guest and wondering whether he would feel better when he awoke or whether she ought to send for a doctor. A hoarse cough roused her an hour later, and she went with speed to her patient, and found him tossing and battling in his sleep with some imaginary foe. “I don’t owe you a cent any longer!” he declared fiercely. “I’ve paid it all, even to the interest while I was in France; and there’s no reason why I shouldn’t tell you just what I think of you. You can go to thunder with your kind offers. I’m off _you_ for life!” And then the big fellow turned with a groan of anguish, and buried his face in his pillow. Miss Marilla paused in horror, thinking she had intruded upon some secret meditation; but, as she waited on tiptoe and breathless in the hall, she heard the steady hoarse breathing keep on, and knew that he was still asleep. He did not rouse, more than to open bloodshot, unseeing eyes and close them again when she loudly stirred his medicine in the glass and held the spoon to his lips. As before, he obediently opened his mouth and swallowed, and went on sleeping.