It was a very sensible reaction, though I do not think he was sensible of it, which made his mind turn with a sudden rebound to Reine, after Kate and Sophy had been unkind to him. Reine was hasty and high-spirited, and had made him feel now and then that she did not quite approve of him; but she never would have left him in the lurch, as the other girls had done; and he was very fond of Herbert, and very glad of his recovery; and he wanted change: so that all these causes together worked him to a sudden resolution, and this was how it happened that he appeared all at once, without preface or announcement, in the Kanderthal, before the little inn, like an angel sent to help her in her extremity, at Reine’s moment of greatest need. And whether it was the general helpfulness, hopefulness, and freshness of the stranger, like a wholesome air from home, or whether it was a turning-point in the malady, I cannot tell, but Herbert began to mend from that very night. Everard infused a certain courage into them all. He relieved Reine, whose terrible disappointment had stupefied her, and who for the first time had utterly broken down under the strain which overtasked her young faculties. He roused up François, who though he went on steadily with his duty, was out of heart too, and had resigned himself to his young master’s death. “He has been as bad before, and got better,” Everard said, though he did not believe what he was saying; but he made both Reine and François believe it, and, what was still better, Herbert himself, who rallied and made a last desperate effort to get hold again of the thread of life, which was so fast slipping out of his languid fingers. “It is a relapse,” said Everard, “an accidental relapse, from the wetting; he has not really lost ground.” And to his own wonder he gradually saw this pious falsehood grow into a truth.