He was very ill. She was not afraid. Fate was here--and she told Japhra he would recover. She found him in the van, his pipe alight again and staring in a dullish way at the vacant places whence Percival's belongings had been removed. He came down to her, and when she told him her belief he had a strange look and a long look into her eyes before he answered. He had marked the tearlessness that went curiously with her devotion when he had brought her to Percival; he marked now some strange appearance she had for him and some strange note in her voice when she told him "He will recover." "Ay, mistress," he said. "Have no fear. He will recover." For her own part she marked also some strange look in the strangely strong eyes that regarded her. She asked "But why are you so confident?" He noticed the "But." "Mistress, because his type is made for a bigger thing than he has yet met." To that--meeting so strongly the truth she knew--she replied: "Yes!--yes!" At her tone he came a sudden step to her. "Mistress, is it in thy hands, this thing he must meet?" She, by the influence of this meeting, stood caught up and dizzy by return to her in dreadful violence of that old fluttering within her brain. Japhra in stern and sudden voice: "Beware it!" He thought her eyes questioned him and he answered them: "Why have I from the first known some big thing waited him?--it was somehow told me. Why beware?--I am somehow warned." She turned and began to go away. Come out of the fluttering, she could not at once recall what had passed between her and this little man. Japhra put a quick hand on her arm: "Mistress, beware lest thou betrayest him!" She remembered that. CHAPTER VIII A COLD 'UN FOR EGBERT HUNT. ROUGH 'UNS FOR PERCIVAL I Ima's nursing, as that doctor had said, brought Percival back from where he had been driven beyond the mark by stress of events and put him firmly afoot along the road of convalescence. Only one circumstance arose to distress those days of his returning strength--the news of Egbert Hunt. The assizes at Salisbury followed quick on the capture of the fugitive--run to earth in a wood by the Blue Boys and the tough boys and brought back like some wild creature trapped--soaked, soiled, bruised, faint, furious, terrified and struggling, for prompt committal by the magistrate. A newspaper reporter at the assizes wrote of him as having again that appearance of some wild creature trapped when he stood in the dock before the Judge. The case attracted considerable local interest. There was first the fact that famous Boss Maddox had narrowly escaped death at the prisoner's hand: there was second the appearance of a noble lady of the county--Lady Burdon--as witness for the defence.