good. I know
you are in heaven."

He spoke in a whisper and no one heard what he said, though all noted
the pallor of his face and the heavy rings about his eyes, and when the
next day it was rumored in town that he was very sick, no one was
surprised. It was brain fever, induced by the strain upon his mental
powers, and the cold he had taken that night when, unknown to any one,
he had gone to the farm-house through the storm, and returned again.

For three weeks he lay at the very gates of death, watched and cared for
as few boys have ever been cared for and watched, for he was the idol of
hearts which would break if he were to die. The farm-house was shut up,
and Hannah took her post as chief nurse to the boy she loved so much,
and whose condition puzzled her a little. Once, in the first days of his
illness, when, after an absence of an hour or so, she re-entered the
room, where his father was keeping watch, he lifted his bright,
fever-stricken eyes to her face, and asked:

"Who was the man?"

"What man?" Hannah and her brother asked, simultaneously, a great fear
in the heart of each lest the other had betrayed what Grey was not to
know.

"Have you told him?" Burton whispered to his sister, who answered:

"You know I have not." Then, turning to Grey, who was still looking at
her, she said to him again: "What man?"

For a moment the wild, bright eyes regarded her fixedly; then there
seemed to come over the boy a gleam of reason, and he replied:

"I don't know."

After that he never mentioned the man again, or in any way alluded to
the secret weighing so heavily upon the two who watched him so
constantly--Hannah and his father. Not a word ever passed between them
either on the subject, so anxious were they for the life of the lad, who
in his delirium talked constantly of the past, of Europe, and the ship,
and the mountains he had climbed, and whose names were on his
Alpenstock. Again he was at Carnarvon, going over the old castle, and
again at Melrose, fighting on the fourth of July with Neil McPherson,
who had said his mother was not a lady. Then there were quieter moods,
when he talked of and to little Bessie McPherson, whom he had never
seen, but who came to him in his delirium, and, with her sunny blue eyes
and golden hair, hovered around his bed, while he questioned her of the
little room high up in the hotel, where she went without her dinner so
often, while her heartless mother dined luxuriantly.

"