ing. The town clock was striking
the quarter-past ten when Miss Grierson confessed that she had exhausted
the list of possibilities.

"I must go back at once," she declared. "Miss Davidson--the day
nurse--has been on duty constantly since six this morning, and I'm not
going to let her kill herself."

"But you haven't been able to find anybody. Who will relieve her?"

Then came the thunderbolt--and beyond it the beckoning. "You and I
will," she said calmly. And then, as if to forestall the possible
refusal: "It is merely to sit in the next room and to go in and give him
his medicine at half-hour intervals. Either of us can do that much for a
poor old man who is making his last stand in the fight for his life."

Three days earlier, nay, one day earlier, Griswold might have recoiled
in horror from the suggestion that thrust itself into heart and brain.
But now he merely pushed the unspeakable prompting into the background.
Of course, he would go; and, equally of course, he would share the night
watch with her. One question he permitted himself, and it was not asked
until after they had reached the darkened mansion on the lake's edge and
were mounting the stair to the sick-room. Was Mr. Galbraith conscious?
Could he recognize any one?

"No," was the low-voiced response; and presently they had reached the
outer room of shaded lights, and the sleepy day nurse had been released,
and Margery was explaining the medicines to her watch sharer.

It was a simple matter, as she had said; the medicine from the larger
bottle was to be given in tea-spoonful doses on the even hour, and that
in the smaller, ten drops in a little water, on the alternating
half-hours.

"It's his heart chiefly, now," she explained, "and this drop-medicine is
for that. If you should forget to give it--but I know you won't forget.
There are books in the hall case, and you can sit in here and read. When
you are tired, come and tap at the door of my room and I'll take what
you leave."

While she was speaking the softly chiming clock in the lower hall struck
the half-hour. "I'll help you give him the first dose," she went on; and
he stood by and watched her as she dropped the heart-stimulant into a
spoon and diluted it with a little water. "Come," she said; and they
went together into the adjoining room.

Griswold had been hardening himself deliberately to look unmoved upon
what the shaded electric night-light in the farther room should reveal:
it was