house, where Auntie Sue, after providing him with nightclothes,
left by one of her guests, by tactful entreaty and judicial commands,
persuaded him to go to bed.

Then followed several days and nights of weary watching. There were
times when the man lay with closed eyes, so weak and exhausted that he
seemed to be drifting out from these earthly shores on the deep waters
of that wide and unknown sea into which all the streams of life finally
flow. But, always, Auntie Sue miraculously held him back. There were
other times when, by all the rules of the game, he should have worn a
strait-jacket;--when his delirium filled the room with all manner
of horrid creatures from the pit; when leering devils and loathsome
serpents and gibbering apes tormented him until his unnatural strength
was the strength of a fiend, and his tortured nerves shrieked in agony.
But Auntie Sue perversely ignored the rules of the game. And never did
the man, even in his most terrible moments, fail to recognize in the
midst of the hellish crew of his diseased imagination the silvery-haired
old teacher as the angel of his salvation. Her gentle voice had always
power to soothe and calm him. He obeyed her implicitly, and, like a
frightened child, holding fast to her hand would beg piteously for her
to protect and save him.

But no word of the man's low-muttered, broken sentences, nor of his
wildest ravings, ever gave Auntie Sue a clue to his identity. She
searched his clothes, but there was not a thing to give her even his
name.

And, yet, that first day, when Judy would have gone to neighbor Tom's
for help, Auntie Sue said "No." She even positively forbade the girl to
mention the stranger's presence in the house, should she chance to talk
with passing neighbors. "The river brought him to us, Judy, dear," she
said. "We must save him. No one shall know his shame, to humiliate and
wound his pride and drag him down after he is himself again. Until he
has recovered and is once more the man I believe him to be, no one must
see him or know that he is here; and no one must ever know how he came
to us."

And late, one evening, when Judy was fast asleep, and the man was lying
very still after a period of feverish tossing and muttering, the dear
old gentlewoman crept quietly out of the house into the night. She was
gone some time, and when she returned again to the stranger's bedside
she was breathless and trembling as from some unusual exertion. And the
follo