" put in Penzance unflinchingly.

"Thank you--whether you are right or wrong," answered Mount Dunstan,
striding by his side. "When I am awake, she is as much a part of my
existence as my breath itself. When I think things over, I find that I
am asking myself if her thoughts would be like mine. She is a creature
of action. Last night, as I lay awake, I said to myself, 'She would DO
something. What would she do?' She would not be held back by fear of
comment or convention. She would look about her for the utilisable, and
she would find it somewhere and use it. I began to sum up the village
resources and found nothing--until my thoughts led me to my own house.
There it stood--empty and useless. If it were hers, and she stood in my
place, she would make it useful. So I decided."

"You are quite right," Mr. Penzance said again.

They spent an hour in his library at the vicarage, arranging practical
methods for transforming the great ballroom into a sort of hospital
ward. It could be done by the removal of pieces of furniture from the
many unused bedrooms. There was also the transportation of the patients
from the huts to be provided for. But, when all this was planned out,
each found himself looking at the other with an unspoken thought in his
mind. Mount Dunstan first expressed it.

"As far as I can gather, the safety of typhoid fever patients depends
almost entirely on scientific nursing, and the caution with which even
liquid nourishment is given. The woman whose husband died this morning
told me that he had seemed better in the night, and had asked for
something to eat. She gave him a piece of bread and a slice of cold
bacon, because he told her he fancied it. I could not explain to her, as
she sat sobbing over him, that she had probably killed him. When we have
patients in our ward, what shall we feed them on, and who will know how
to nurse them? They do not know how to nurse each other, and the women
in the village would not run the risk of undertaking to help us."

But, even before he had left the house, the problem was solved for them.
The solving of it lay in the note Miss Vanderpoel had written the night
before at Stornham.

When it was brought to him Mr. Penzance glanced up from certain
calculations he was making upon a sheet of note-paper. The accumulating
difficulties made him look worn and tired. He opened the note and read
it gravely, and then as gravely, though with a change of expression,
handed it to