Reuben Cowder never knew how he reached the wretched inn in which the little party had found shelter. Seeing him reeling and running through the street, one might have thought him demented, but dementia was too familiar in Durazzo in those days to cause remark. Nikola Petrovitch, meeting him at the door, shrank from his outstretched hands as if they were those of a ghost. In all his imaginings of what might happen to hasten the day when he could put his precious charge still alive into her father's care, he had never dreamed of this. Reuben Cowder here! Shaking his hands--begging for the truth--Was Nancy alive? Could he see her? Nikola Petrovitch had no squeamish notions about joy killing; also he knew better than nurse or doctor the spirit and the courage of the woman for whose life he had dared every danger that nature and man in their most murderous moods devise. He took Reuben Cowder by the hand and led him straight into the narrow stone-floored chamber where Nancy Cowder lay, and he took the astonished nurse by the arm and led her out. He was right, for a half hour later, when Reuben Cowder called back the nurse, the first color that had tinged the girl's cheeks in weeks was on them, and every day that followed, in spite of the difficulties and dangers in getting away from Durazzo, and the discomforts of the passage across the Adriatic on the crowded steamer, Nancy Cowder grew stronger. She would get well, she told her father confidently. These brave people who had brought her safe to Durazzo should not have risked themselves for nothing. And as for her father, never, never again would she leave him. But getting well was to be a slow, slow process. They took her to a nook in the French Mediterranean, and there for months she lay, regaining little by little her all but exhausted vitality. Reuben Cowder stayed at her side, and Nikola Petrovitch was sent back to Sabinsport and to his family. It was from Nikola that Sabinsport learned more of the heroism of Nancy and the devotion of her Serbian rescuers than Reuben Cowder himself ever knew. Her parting with her friends had not been an accident, as they had led him to believe. It had been a chance deliberately taken by Nikola when Nancy, worn out by her long year's work, had totally collapsed after a few days of the terrible sights and hardships of the retreat. They had found her one morning burning with fever and babbling nonsense. It was then that Nikola had asserted himself. Give him a bullock and a cart and the food they could spare, send one of the Serbian women with him, and he would take her to a place he knew in the mountains which the Austrians would never find. When she was fit to move he would get her to a seaport or send her father word how to find her. And the group of terrified girls, knowing that death was almost certain in the rout in which they found themselves, believing this a chance, consented, yet in their hearts they never thought to see her again.