m and I wrote
telegrams for Caliban to take in the launch--wrote them as well as I
could in the clutches of a violent chill, with my teeth like castanets
and my hands palsied--and even as I wrote, it came to me that
Margarita had repeated monotonously, all the way home, in a hoarse,
painful voice (but, mercifully, a low one) "get a rope, get a rope,
get a rope."

It was the voice I had heard, that turned me back!

She was all right, but very weak and sore and with a little fever--not
much. She was perfectly conscious of everything within an hour, and
told us about it: how she had slipped and Roger had hit his head and
strained himself in going after her. She thinks she held him under the
arms ten minutes, screaming all the time! She sent Rosy back, finally,
though at first he refused to go.

Roger was delirious for five days and very dangerously ill for three
weeks--it was double pneumonia. Miss Jencks had seen it before and it
was her prompt measures before we could get the doctor or Harriet that
saved him, they think. It was a bad age for pneumonia; Harriet said
she would rather have pulled Margarita through it. She brought a
deaconess from the little dispensary with her and one or the other was
watching him like a cat every second, for three weeks. It was a
nurse's case, the doctor said, though he stopped the first week.

When Margarita came to herself after an hour or so, she asked for me,
and as I knelt by her bed and she turned her great eyes on me I caught
my breath, for I was looking at a new woman. I can't describe it
better than by saying that she had a soul! There had always been
something missing, you see, though I would never have admitted it, if
she hadn't got it then. But it was there.

It was very pathetic, those first days when Roger was delirious: she
was nearly so herself. And yet it was not wholly grief--there was a
definite reason for it, which we all felt, somehow, but she would not
give it.

"Will he not know me for a minute, a little minute, Harriet?" she
would beg, so piteously, and Harriet would soothe her and try to give
her hope. The fifth day he was very low and the doctor told us to make
up our minds for anything: he hadn't slept all night. I took Harriet
by the shoulders and asked her if she could not possibly make him
conscious--before. I don't know why I asked her and not the doctor,
but I did. She promised me she would try (I think she had nearly
given up hope, herself) and at t