could be found for it, and doing good
service meanwhile as an occasional parish nurse. The baby and its nurse
went over to the cottage. Catherine carried the child there, wrapped
close in maternal arms, and leaving her on old Martha's lap, went back
to Robert.

Then she and he devoted themselves to a hand-to-hand fight with the
epidemic. At the climax of it there were about twenty children down with
it in different stages, and seven cases of fever. They had two hospital
nurses; one of the better cottages, turned into a sanatorium,
accommodated the worst cases under the nurses, and Robert and Catherine,
directed by them and the doctors, took the responsibility of the rest,
he helping to nurse the boys and she the girls. Of the fever cases
Sharland's wife was the worst. A feeble creature at all times, it seemed
almost impossible she could weather through. But day after day passed,
and by dint of incessant nursing she still lived. A youth of twenty,
the main support of a mother and five or six younger children was also
desperately ill. Robert hardly ever had him out of his thoughts, and the
boy's dog-like affection for the rector, struggling with his deathly
weakness, was like a perpetual exemplification of Ahriman and
Ormuzd--the power of life struggling with the power of death.

It was a fierce fight. Presently it seemed to the husband and wife as
though the few daily hours spent at the rectory were mere halts between
successive acts of battle with the plague-fiend--a more real and grim
Grendel of the Marshes--for the lives of children. Catherine could
always sleep in these intervals, quietly and dreamlessly; Robert very
soon could only sleep by the help of some prescription of old Meyrick's.
On all occasions of strain since his boyhood there had been signs in him
of a certain lack of constitutional hardness which his mother knew very
well, but which his wife was only just beginning to recognise. However,
he laughed to scorn any attempt to restrain his constant goings and
comings, or those hours of night-nursing, in which, as the hospital
nurses were the first to admit, no one was so successful as the rector.
And when he stood up on Sundays to preach in Murewell Church, the worn
and spiritual look of the man, and the knowledge warm at each heart of
those before him of how the rector not only talked but lived, carried
every word home.

This strain upon all the moral and physical forces, however, strangely
enough, came