In this, however, she was sadly mistaken. She had even thought of shyly slipping away and leaving him to sleep through the night alone, until, standing over his bed, she beheld the figure that had always seemed so well-knit and self-reliant and tireless, shaking and trembling in the clutch of an approaching chill. It seemed to tear her very heartstrings, as she gave him brandy, and even flung her own coat and skirt over him, to see him lying there so impotent, so childishly afraid of solitude, so miserably craven, before this unknown enemy of bodily weakness. As the night advanced the fever that followed on Durkin’s chill increased, his thirst became unappeasable, and from the second leather couch in the back room, where she had flung herself down in utter weariness of nerve and limb, she could hear him mumbling. Toward morning she awakened suddenly, from an hour of sound sleep, and found Durkin out of bed, fighting at his bedroom mantelpiece, protesting, babblingly, that he had seen a blood-red mouse run under the grate and that at all hazard it must be got out. She led him back to bed, and during the five days that his fever burned through him she never once gave herself up to the luxury of actual sleep. Often, during the day and night, she would fling herself down on her couch, in a condition of half-torpor, but at the least word or sound from him she was astir again. Then, as his mind grew clearer, and he came to recognize her once more, her earlier sense of loneliness and half-helpless isolation crept away from her. She even grew to take a secret pleasure in giving him his medicine and milk and tablets, in dressing his wound, day by day, in making his pillow more comfortable, in sending the colored hall-boy out after fruit and flowers for him, and in all those duties which broke down the last paling of reserve between them. And it was a new and unlooked for phase of Frances Candler that Durkin slowly grew to comprehend. The constraint and the quietness of everything seemed to have something akin to a spiritualizing effect on each of them, and it was not long before he waited for her coming and going with a sort of childish wistfulness. Her tenderness of speech and touch and look, her brooding thoughtfulness as she sat beside him, seemed to draw them together more closely than even their old-time most perilous moments had done. “We’re going to be decent now, aren’t we, Frank?” he said, quietly and joyously one morning. But there were times when his weakness and stagnation of life and thought gave rise to acute suffering in both of them, times when his imprisonment and his feebleness chafed and galled him. It was agony for her to see him in passionate outbursts, to be forced to stand helplessly by and behold him unmanned and weeping, sometimes when his nervous irritability was at its worst, wantonly and recklessly blaspheming at his fate.