The day that the doctor pronounced him out of danger, Mr. Trimblerigg had already felt so much better, that he wanted to get up. Life having become attractive again, he was impatient to go out and meet it once more on his own terms. And when he had seen from the medical eye that all was to be well with him, he was as anxious to have word of it as though it were a compliment on his good looks. ‘What does he say of me?’ he asked when his sister returned from seeing the doctor to the door. Davidina, having measured him judicially with her eye, settled that he was well enough for an indulgence that would be mutual. ‘He says you are out of danger,’ she answered; ‘so now you are in it again.’ ‘In what?’ ‘In your own way,’ she replied, elliptically. ‘It’s done you no harm being ill. To be safe from yourself for a fortnight never happened to you before. Mother calls it a God’s mercy you’re still alive. Perhaps it is: I don’t know.’ Mr. Trimblerigg lay trying to read her face and the meanings behind it. ‘Have I been a great trouble?’ he asked at last. ‘People can’t be as ill as you’ve been, without giving some trouble,’ she answered. Yet he had a consciousness that he had been good, as goodness goes on a bed of sickness; and he hankered to have it said. ‘Wasn’t I a good patient?’ he inquired in a tone of meek repentance. ‘I’m so sorry.’ ‘You were as good as you knew how,’ replied Davidina, ‘and that’s not saying a little; for you _know_ more than most; if you’d only do it.’ She paused, then added, ‘You were very good when you were out of your senses.’ ‘What did I say?’ inquired Mr. Trimblerigg anxiously; for the possibilities of unconscious goodness alarmed him. ‘Your prayers.’ (His anxiety increased.) ‘You didn’t say much. ’Twas either “God, I am not as other men are,” or “God, be merciful to me a sinner,” just those two things, one or other; and they both sounded real, as if you meant ’em.’ There was a long pause, while Mr. Trimblerigg calculated; he had got the right atmosphere for it at last; so gathering his strength he said: ‘Davidina, it was I pushed you into the river.’ The avowal struck Davidina a cold blow: she had not reckoned that feebleness, or illness, or affection, or gratitude, or anything indeed but fear would ever have made Mr. Trimblerigg own truth against himself so long after the date. Then she looked deeper, and realized that it was fear: he was trying to get out of her clutches by telling the truth. She countered him by telling a lie herself. ‘I didn’t know it,’ she said; ‘I never felt you touch me.’ ‘But I did!’ he insisted. ‘Well, if you did, you didn’t do it on purpose.’ Into this trap he fell. ‘Yes, I did!’ he declared. ‘I hated you: I pushed you in because I wanted you to drown.’ Reassured, she saw that once more he was telling lies. It comforted her to find that he had not got out of her depth; her old Jonathan, the Jonathan she knew, was safely hers again.