"If you can be kept from, dying of
weakness."

"And how comes it that you nurse me?"

"I have given myself up to be a nurse."

"And have you nursed me all this
month?"

"No, not the first week: not till after
my child was buried."

The tone of that last answer made me
shudder. It was so unnatural, in its perfect
freedom from all emotion.

"I shall tire you," I said; "lay me
down."

Fear was regaining its empire over me.

She did as I asked her, and, after she
had arranged my pillows and the bedclothes
neatly, moved to her work-table. The
delicious sense of warm life was fast dying
away out of me.

"Are you Mrs. Rosscar?" I asked, pre-
sently, raising myself on one elbow, for an
instant, to look at her.

"I am your nurse," she answered me,
without looking up from her work.

I made another effort to try and get
things explained and disentangled; but
they were too much for me. Before I had
framed another question I was overwhelmed
by sleep.

That was my second "lucid interval."
The first in which I was capable of speech,
I believe. A week elapsed before I had
another.

I knew something of what passed; I
distinguished voices; I knew that Dr. Fearnwell
was often in the room; I was conscious
that I had a second nurse. I knew who she
was: one of the hospital-nurses, a good,
honest, hearty creature, but coarse and
rough—a woman never entrusted with the
care of delicate cases; but she seemed to
act here as servant to Mrs. Rosscar. I
knew all these things, but they seemed to
concern some other person. When I tried
to recognise myself in things, to take hold
of anything with distinct self-consciousness,
then came those horrible sweats and swoons,
and overwhelmed me.

It was a strange wild phase of semi-
existence, instructive to a man of my
profession to pass through.

For some time after I had got on a good
way towards recovery, I talked and thought
of myself as "that sick man:" seemed
to watch what was done to me, as if it were
being done to some other person.

When this phase cleared off, the sense of
relief was not unmixed: for I had so
laboriously to take myself to myself again—
to learn that that sick man's history was
mine, that his memories were mine, his
remorses mine, that I often groaned at the
labour of it.

"You would never have struggled
through, but for the skill and the devotion
of your nurse," Dr. Fearnwell said to me.

"So he thinks I have struggled through
now," I remarked to Mrs. Rosscar when
he was gone. " I must call you something
different from ' nurse.' " I went on. " It
is impossible that you and that good rough
creature should share one title between
you."

"I should share no title with any good
creature."

"You know it was not that I meant."

"I know it was not that you meant."

"What may I call you?"

"You may call me, if you choose, by my
own name, Huldah."

"Huldah!" I repeated. "I wish you
had a softer name. It is difficult to say
Huldah softly, and—"

"I have known it said softly," she
answered. " I have never, since I was a
child, been called by that name, except by
one person. You may call me by it."

Saying this, she let her eyes, which I had
hardly ever, till then, for one moment,,
been able to meet, rest on mine with a
heavy fulness of expression that sent a
languid subtle fire through my veins—that,
also, made me again afraid: after meeting
it, I watched, covertly, for its recurrence.

Mine was a long-protracted uncertain
convalescence. I did not set my will
towards growing well. I yielded myself up
rather to the luxury of my position, yielded
myself up, body and soul, as it were. I
was under a spell of fascination not devoid
of fear. The shock that felled me had
come upon me when my whole health of
mind and body was at a low ebb. In looking
back, I recognise this, though I had
not at the time been conscious of it. I
had never, since I was a boy, given myself
a holiday; never given one hour's
indulgence to any passion but that of ambition,
till I knew Mrs. Rosscar.

At the time of my meeting her, I had
just come to the dregs of my powers, but
was not yet conscious of the bitterness of
those dregs.

Now, it seemed as if my whole nature—
moral, intellectual, physical—voluntarily
succumbed. I lay, as I have said, under
a spell, and luxuriated in my own
powerlessness. As yet it was not the bitter but
the sweet dregs of the cup that were passing
over my lips.