And with regard to Theo it was as he said. For many weeks Theo Carnegy lay battling for her life in the cruel clutches of the fever, unconscious that her most devoted and tenderest nurse was the father whom she had bitterly imagined thought more of his hobby than of his boys and girls. All Northbourne, as with one heart, sorrowed aloud for their favourite Miss Theedory; her grave condition was the sole theme of talk in the cottages round the bay. 'Happen she was too good to live!' croaked Jerry Blunt's mother, with an appropriate melancholy in her voice; and the gossips nodded approvingly at a sentiment which fitted in with their own views of life. 'Nothin' o' the sort!' struck in a dissentient voice, which belonged to Goody Dempster herself. 'There's none too good to live, seein' as life is a great gift that can only come from the Lord Himself. He gives, and He takes away, that's how we've got to look at things. And, please God, He will see fit to raise up Miss Theedory among us again, hale and sound. She's one as could be ill spared.' 'Amen!' assented more than one voice among the listeners, in ready response. But there was one heart that felt heavier than all others--too heavy to hold a ray of hope--and that belonged to Alick Carnegy. When he returned home from his stolen holiday, and found what had happened during his absence, the remorse of the boy was uncontrollable. He could not but feel it to be true, what others did not scruple to tell him bluntly, for plain-speaking was a distinguishing feature of the fishing village, that had he and Ned Dempster been at home, they could have reached his sisters in far less time than Geoff, younger and weaker of muscle, and Binks, long past his heyday of strength and stiffened with rheumatism, had done. With cold shivers of dread, he heard how Theo, though delivered from one perilous strait, lay in jeopardy of her life in the new peril of fever. She would die, he was convinced, and voices seemed to be incessantly crying in his ears: 'It will be your fault, all your fault! You fought to have your own way, in spite of her pleadings, and now she will die because you were not here to help her in such sore peril. She was deserted, so she will die, our Theo!' Alick, a boy of strong feelings, became maddened by despair, and exaggerated the calamity. As time went on--and brain fever rarely hurries itself--Theo grew no better, but rather weaker, and Alick secretly called himself her murderer. He was distraught. 'Oh, Ned, if we had been at home, you and I, we could have reached them in half the time Geoff and old Binks took! We could have rescued them before "The Theodora" began to settle down!' he blurted out when he found Ned sobbing helplessly in a corner of the tea-house, The latter, though not possessed of Alick's torturing powers of imagination, was overcome with remorse for his own share in the transaction.