"I think I see a way out of your difficulties. Can you not make a new diagnosis of Captain Pegram's case--finding him ill of tuberculosis, or typhoid, or some other wasting malady corresponding with his external appearance, thus concealing the fact that he suffers in consequence of a wound? He speaks French like a Parisian--I suppose he can even dream in that language, as I always do--so for safety and by way of forwarding my plan, you may regard him as a French gentleman who has fallen ill during his travels in America, and come to you for treatment. You are to be very anxious to secure a French nurse for him, and to that end you may write as soon as you receive this, to the gentlewoman whose address in Baltimore is enclosed, asking her to procure such a nurse if she can. I will be that nurse, and will know no English during my stay. This plan will enable me to go to Captain Pegram's bedside without exciting the least suspicion, and, when he is sufficiently recovered to travel, there will be little if any trouble in arranging for his nurse to take the convalescent to New York, and thence to Europe. Once out of the country and well again, he can go to Nassau, and thence to a Southern port on one of the English blockade-running ships. To secure all this we must scrupulously maintain the fiction that he is a Frenchman, and I a French nurse." Agatha's first care on the next morning was to visit the banker and instruct him as to the part he was to play in the conspiracy, when the telegram should come from Baltimore. That done, she plied her needle nimbly, fashioning caps, aprons and the like, such as French nurses only wore at that time, before there were any trained nurses other than Frenchwomen among us. She was already wearing black gowns, of course, and when she added a jet rosary and a stiffly starched broad white collar to her costume, she had no need to inform anybody that she was a hospital-bred nurse from Paris. In the little Maryland town where Baillie Pegram lay in a stupor, her advent attracted much curious attention, especially because of the jaunty little nurse's cap she wore, and of her inability to speak English. But this curiosity averted, rather than invited suspicion, as Agatha had intended and planned that it should do. The physician's knowledge of the French language was scant, and his pronunciation was execrably bad, but he managed to greet the nurse in that tongue on her arrival, and to say, very gallantly: "Now my patient should surely get well. Under care of such a nurse even a dead man might be persuaded back to life." XXVII _AGATHA'S WONDER-STORY_ Agatha had been for more than a week at Baillie Pegram's bedside before he manifested any consciousness of her presence. But from the very first her ministrations had seemed to soothe him. Even when his fever brought active delirium with it, a word from his soft-voiced French nurse quieted him, and each day showed less of fever and more of strength.