“I hope so--if he can be kept from any more shocks. That shell to-day seems to have been a kill or cure business--I shouldn’t recommend any more of the same sort. You were there at the time--stuck to him--eh? Very plucky thing to do. Well, you just let him alone now. Don’t try to excite his feelings, or make him recognise you. Give the brain time to recover itself.” “But you are sure it will be all right? Oh, I can’t thank you properly for telling me this--but he will get quite well?” “Very ungrateful if he doesn’t, with such a nurse. Don’t go and wear yourself to a shadow looking after him while he’s insensible. You’ll need all your cheerfulness and good spirits when he recovers consciousness.” Mabel looked dumbly at Dr Tighe. What did this warning portend? The little man answered her mute appeal with friendly alacrity. “At the best he’ll be rather badly scarred, Miss North, but we hope and trust there’ll be nothing else the matter. Colonel Slaney doesn’t mean to imply that you would mind the scars, or that the poor fellow would care about them for his own sake, but it’s likely he will for yours.” “I see. Thank you for telling me. I shall know what to do now,” said Mabel, quite calmly, though the screen trembled where her fingers were gripping it. “Buck up, Queen Mab!” said Dick kindly, lingering behind the other two to give her an encouraging pat on the shoulder. “Never say die!” She caught his hand and wrung it, reading in his action an apology for his hasty speech of the night before, and he smiled at her cheerily as she disappeared behind the screen. Fitz was still lying in the state of stupor in which she had left him, and she sat down beside the bed, and tried to lay her plans for the future. As she recalled what Colonel Slaney had said, it was natural that the man himself should recur to her mind. “Why, we must be relieved!” she said to herself. “How stupid of me never to have thought of it. Colonel Slaney belongs to the column, of course. And Dick has come back safe, too. And I took it all for granted, and nobody said anything. Where can Georgie be--and Flora?” Wondering again at the calm way in which the three men had ignored the almost incredible fact of the ending of the siege, she tried to recall her conversation with them, in order to see whether any allusion had been made to it, and suddenly remembered what had struck her vaguely at the time, the stranger’s manner. He had not addressed her in the way in which long experience had prepared her to be addressed; in fact, she missed the peculiar deference to which she was accustomed from the other sex.