Brian Luttrell's illness was a long and severe one. He lay insensible for some time, and awoke to wild delirium, which lasted for many days. The Brothers of San Stefano nursed him with the greatest care, and it was observable that the Prior himself spent a good deal of time in the patient's room, and showed unusual interest in his progress towards recovery. The Prior understood English; but if he had hoped to gather any information concerning Brian's history from the ravings of his delirium he was mistaken. Brian's mind ran upon the incidents of his childhood, upon the tour that he had made with his father when he was a boy, upon his school-days; not upon the sad and tragic events with which he had been connected. He scarcely ever mentioned the names of his mother or brother. Like Falstaff, when he lay a-dying, be "babbled of green fields," and nothing more. At one time he grew better: then he had a relapse, and was very near death indeed; but at last the power of youth re-asserted itself, and he came slowly back to life once more. But it was as a man who had been in another world; who had faced the bitterness of death and the darkness of the grave. He was as much startled when he looked at himself for the first time in a looking-glass as a girl who has lost her beauty after a virulent attack of small-pox. Not that he had ever had much beauty to boast of; but the look of youth and hope which had once brightened his eyes was gone; his cheeks were sunken, his temples hollow, his features drawn and pinched with bodily pain and weakness. And--greatest change perhaps of all--his hair had turned from brown to grey; an alteration so striking and visible that, as he put down the little mirror which had been brought to him, he murmured to himself, with a bitter smile--"My own mother would not know me now." And then he turned his face away from the light, and lay silent and motionless for so long a space of time that the lay-brother who waited on him thought that he was sleeping. When he rose from his bed and was able to sit in the sunny garden or the cloisters, spring had come in all its tender glow of beauty, and sent a thrill of fresh life through the sick man's veins.