"I can't say. We shall perhaps never know certainly," he replied. "But it looks very like it. Listen, dear. Some little time ago--two or three years ago--Maynard spent some days at one of those awful leper settlements--never mind where. I would just as soon you did not know. There, to his amazement, among the most devoted of the attendants upon the poor creatures he found an Englishman, young still, at least by his own account, though to judge by his appearance it would have been impossible to say. For he was himself far gone, very far gone in some ways, in the disease. But he was, or had been, a man of strong constitution and enormous determination. Ill as he was, he yet managed to tend others with indescribable devotion. They looked upon him as a saint. Maynard did not like to inquire what had brought him to such a pass--he, the poor fellow, was a perfect gentleman. But the day Sir Abel was leaving, the Englishman took him to some extent into his confidence, and asked him to do him a service. This was his story. Some years before, in quite a different part of the world, the young man had nursed a leper--a dying leper--for some hours. He believed for long that he had escaped all danger, in fact he never thought of it; but it was not so. There must have been an unhealed wound of some kind--a slight scratch would do it--on his hand. No need to go into the details of his first misgivings, of the horror of the awful certainty at last. It came upon him in the midst of the greatest happiness; he was going to be married to a girl he adored." "Oh, Philip, Philip, why did he not tell?" Daisy wailed.