"Ah! but it is not going to be 'poor Maud!'" she said. "You are going to get the poison out of your soul and body. Oh, Thurso, there are going to be many happy days yet." Once again the genial thrill of convalescence, that inflowing tide of strength and recovery, broke like a ripple a little further up the long dry beach, and once again desire stirred within him. But by an effort he detached himself from that, and turned his mind to her and to his own rescue. "And do you really believe I _can_ be cured?" he said. "Is an appalling young person to come and sit by me and sing doggerel hymns? I read something of the sort in a book I found at home the other day. It was yours, I suppose, or Alice's?" "Alice's, I expect," said she. "No; we shall have no appalling young person sitting by you. You know the healer I want you to go to, and you like him." Thurso frowned. He seemed to be able to remember nothing. His memory, he felt, was there, but all that it contained was locked up, and he could not find the key. "That--that fellow in Scotland?" he asked. Then for a moment he got a glimpse, a flash, vivid but brief, connected with him. "I met him in the village street one day," he said, "in Achnaleesh, and he made me feel better. I had an awful headache at the time. I say, that is something gained, you know, because I never have headaches now. What was his name, by the way?" "Mr. Cochrane," said the girl. "Of course, yes. And he dined one night, and played hokey-pokey among the typhoid patients. So he and I are going to sing hymns, are we?" But Maud did not smile now. Thurso was himself in a way that he had not been for weeks. There might only be a minute or two of this, for his mood changed so quickly: it was as if he was not strong enough to remain steady in one attitude for more than a few seconds. And since any moment might see him back again in the hells of despair and hate, she wanted to make the most of this first forward outlook which he had shown. The creeper--his will--was in her hand for a second. She must make some beginning at training it up. "Ah, Thurso, that is right," she said; "look forward, and make an effort to realise where you stand to-day. Sir James says he is helpless; he says you have no will left which he can touch or strengthen. That may be so medically, but I am sure it is there still, and you are going to get God--not any mortal physician--to lay His hand on you. Try to believe, if only for a moment, that all power is His, and that He is all love, all health, all life; that evil and illness and everything of that kind cannot exist in His presence. Don't hang back; don't reserve any part of yourself, for you can help or hinder your cure. We have been hindering it, so I believe, by trusting to the power of man to cure you, because we have kept on wondering if man can cure you. But about God there is no doubt whatever. It is quite beyond question."