x miles out from the town. They brought you
here in a horse blanket, the Professor sent for me, and we have been
taking care of you ever since. Mr. Bradley has been here twice, but
you were too ill to see anybody; he saw that everything possible was
being done. I shall write him directly that you are on the uphill road
now, and that care and patience are all you need.

"Now, take this medicine, Mr. Jerrolds, and repay me for this long
story by going directly to sleep."

I took it, lay for a moment in a dreamy wonder, and drifted off. As
she had said, the uphill journey had begun.

That afternoon I saw the doctor, a grizzled, kindly man, and it was he
who told me what I had already somehow divined--that I owed my life to
Harriet Buxton.

"I never saw such nursing," he said frankly; "the woman has a real
genius. It was nip and tuck with you, Mr. Jerrolds, and she simply set
her teeth and _wouldn't_ give up! One can't wonder the American nurses
get such prices--they're worth it. Now it's hold hard and cultivate
your patience, and get back that two or three stone we lost during the
siege, and then good-bye to me!"

But oh, how long it was! Day after day, and night after night, and day
after day again I counted the pieces of furniture in the bare, dull
room and read faces into the hideous wall-paper and stared into the
empty window. The little night-light punctuated the dark; the feeble
sunlight struggled through the rain. The few kindly friends who called
upon me I could not see; their sympathetic commonplaces were
unendurable to my weakened nerves. Had it not been for the return, now
and then, of the pains I had suffered in my delirium, mercifully less
and less violent, which made the periods of their absence hours of
comparative pleasure, I think I should have grown into a hopeless
nervous invalid from sheer ennui. I had never been ill that I remember
since the days of my childish maladies, and I fretted as only such an
one can and must fret under the irksome novelty of pain, weakness and
irritation.

How Harriet Buxton bore with my whims and fads and downright rudeness,
I cannot tell. When in a fit of contrition I asked her this, she
smiled and said that men were generally irritable.

"But I should go mad if I were obliged to humour the caprices of such
a bear as I!"

"But you are not a nurse!" she answered quietly.

After ten days of steady convalescence, when I was propped up a little
upon my pillows and co