But it was that each step brought him nearer end of a companionship that had gone with deep roots into his heart that made life for the first time seem hard to this questioner. He would not smoke. "The reek would carry back on this breeze and through the windows to him," he told Ima, come beside him while her patient slept. She could never remember seeing her father without his pipe, and she was touched by his simple thought. She slipped her hand into the pocket of his long coat where his hand lay, and entwined their fingers. "Ah, we love him, thou and I," she said. She felt his fingers embrace her own. He asked her quietly: "My daughter, is it bitter for thee when he crieth Dora?" She answered him with that poor plea of hers. "Well, I am a woman," she said. But after a little while she spoke again. "Yet I am glad to suffer so," she told him. "Though he cries Dora, it is my hand that soothes him when he so cries. He sighs then, and is comforted. It is as if he wandered in pain, and wanted me, and finding me was happy. Well, how should I ask more? Often--many years I have prayed he should one day be mine, my own. It is not to be. But now--for a little while--when he cries and when I comfort him, why, my prayer is vouchsafed me. Mine then--my own." III Aunt Maggie saw that wonderful influence Ima exercised over his delirium. When Japhra had carried him up to his bedroom, and when Ima was bringing "his things" from the van, he broke out in raving and in tossing of the arms that utterly alarmed her and Honor, their efforts of no avail. She called in panic for Ima. Ima's touch and voice restored him to instant peace. "You must stay with me," Aunt Maggie said, tears running down her face. "My dear, I beg you stay with me. You are Ima. I know you well. He has often spoken of you. Oh, you will stay?" Afterwards Aunt Maggie went down to thank Japhra for his agreement to this proposal. He would put up his van with the Hannafords, he told Ima--with Stingo, who would shortly be coming, and with Mr. Hannaford--and would stay there, whence he might come daily for news while Ima remained with Percival. Aunt Maggie had grateful tears in her eyes when she thanked him. These, and those tears of panic when she called Ima's aid, were the first she had shed since suddenly the van had brought her Percival to her an hour before. Trembling but dry-eyed she had gone to him and seen his dangerous condition; shaking but tearless had made ready his bed. "Strange-like"? "Touched-like"? It was fate had ordered him back to her, she told herself. Almost upon the eve--within four short months of the twenty-first birthday for which she had planned--he was brought back; and brought back, despite himself, by an agency stronger than his own strong spirit. Fate in that!--the same fate that by Audrey's death-bed had assured her that nothing would fail her, and that by a hundred seeming chances had justified its assurance through the years.