"Oh, never mind! What does it matter?" "It does matter,"--he protested, with a touch of petulance--"I know it is July, but what time of July?" She laughed again. "It's not July," she said. "Not July!" "No. Nor August!" He raised himself on his pillow and stared at her in questioning amazement. "Not July? Not August? Then----?" She took his hand between her own kind warm palms, stroking it soothingly up and down. "It's not July, and it's not August!" she repeated, nodding at him as though he were a worried and fractious child--"It's the second week in September. There!" His eyes turned from right to left in utter bewilderment. "But how----" he murmured---- Then he suddenly caught her hands in the one she was holding. "You mean to say that I have been ill all those weeks--a burden upon you?" "You've been ill all those weeks--yes!" she answered "But you haven't been a burden. Don't you think it! You've--you've been a pleasure!" And her blue eyes filled with soft tears, which she quickly mastered and sent back to the tender source from which they sprang; "You have, really!" He let go her hand and sank back on his pillows with a smothered groan. "A pleasure!" he muttered--"I!" And his fuzzy eyebrows met in almost a frown as he again looked at her with one of the keen glances which those who knew him in business had learned to dread. "Mary Deane, do not tell me what is not and what cannot be true! A sick man--an old man--can be no 'pleasure' to anyone;--he is nothing but a bore and a trouble, and the sooner he dies the better!" The smiling softness still lingered in her eyes. "Ah well!"--she said--"You talk like that because you're not strong yet, and you just feel a bit cross and worried! You'll be better in another few days----" "Another few days!" he interrupted her--"No--no--that cannot be--I must be up and tramping it again--I must not stay on here--I have already stayed too long." A slight shadow crossed her face, but she was silent. He watched her narrowly. "I've been off my head, haven't I?" he queried, affecting a certain brusqueness in his tone--"Talking a lot of nonsense, I suppose?" "Yes--sometimes,"--she replied--"But only when you were _very_ bad." "And what did I say?" She hesitated a moment, and he grew impatient. "Come, come!" he demanded, irritably--"What did I say?" She looked at him candidly. "You talked mostly about 'Tom o' the Gleam,'"--she answered--"That was a poor gypsy well known in these parts. He had just one little child left to him in the world--its mother was dead. Some rich lord driving a motor car down by Cleeve ran over the poor baby and killed it--and Tom----" "Tom tracked the car to Blue Anchor, where he found the man who had run over his child and killed _him_!" said Helmsley, with grim satisfaction--"I saw it done!" Mary shuddered.