Presently he said, as if he had been thinking, “I’ve had a big long sleep, I guess, and my throat hurt so, and when I was thirsty, I dreamed that my mother used to turn over my pillow when it burned, and you always came and gave me a cool drink. Did you, Daddy? Was it always you?” “Yes, always.” “And did mother turn my pillow? Did you see her?” “I did not see her, Asa, but then she may have been there; you know the room was often dark.” “Everything is normal now,” the doctor said that evening when he came in; “in another month, with fresh air and careful feeding, the Boy will be quite himself again.” Then at last the sluice-gates opened, and the waters of sorrow and joy, so long pent up, rushed forth, and the Man stood before the doctor, his arm before his face, sobbing like a woman. At first, the doctor was minded to steal away, then, realizing the nerve strain Ernest had undergone, he laid his hand upon the arm to urge him to go to bed, and repressed a start, for the flesh burned under his touch. Worn out by his vigil and carelessness of self, the Man had caught the fever. “But I cannot go to bed; the Boy is only half out of the woods even now,” protested Ernest, as father told him of his condition in as few words as possible. “Do not worry about him,” said father, cheerily. “I will fumigate his things to-morrow and take him down to our house and Mrs. Evan’s care if it is necessary, I promise you.” So the Man yielded to the weariness that weighed him down, and soon, in his turn, was tossing in delirium, not knowing that a white-capped nurse was caring for him as he had cared for the Boy. The fever itself had taken but a slight hold on Ernest; it was the other spectres, worse than death, that threatened him, Deafness and Blindness; his parched throat and tongue refused to form coherent sound, as he lay there with bandaged eyes and ears, that surgery had rendered wholly deaf in the one hope that Nature might repair the necessary wounds. As the fever left, and consciousness returned to stay, loneliness possessed him, entire and complete; except through the sense of touch, he was utterly isolated from his kind. The days went by, until one came, after the pain had left his eyes, when they removed the bandages cautiously, and he saw the chintz figures of the wall-paper in the partly darkened room, and heaven itself could not have seemed a fairer vision. Presently they let him read, a few words at a time, and the nurse wrote answers to his various questions on a pad that she kept upon the bed; but oftentimes, when he thought that he was speaking, he had in reality made no sound, for he could not hear his own voice.