nursing. His reason was saved.

"In your own room at the hotel," she whispered. "Don't you remember? You
were taken ill."

He looked at her, helpless and puzzled. Slowly the mists began to roll
away.

"Yes, you were with me," he murmured softly. "I remember now. I was
telling you the story of the past--my past. You are Margharita's child.
Yes, I remember. Was it this afternoon?"

She kissed his forehead, and then drew back suddenly, lest the warm tear
which was quivering on her eyelid should fall back upon his face.

"It was three weeks ago!"

"Three weeks ago!" He looked wonderingly around--at the little table at
his side, where a huge bowl of sweet-scented roses was surrounded by a
little army of empty medicine bottles, at Margharita's pale, wan face,
and at a couch drawn up to the bedside. "And you have been nursing me
all the time?" he whispered.

She smiled brightly through the tears which she could not hide.

"Of course I have. Who has a better right, I should like to know?"

He sighed and closed his eyes. In a few minutes he was asleep.

For a fortnight his life had hung upon a thread, and even when the
doctor had declared him out of danger, the question of his sanity or
insanity quivered upon the balance for another week. He would either
awake perfectly reasonable, in all respects his old self, or he would
open his eyes upon a world, the keynote to which he had lost forever. In
other words he would either awake a perfectly sane man, or hopelessly
and incurably insane. There would be no middle course. That was the
doctor's verdict.

And through all those long days and nights Margharita had watched over
him as though he had been her own father. All the passionate sympathy of
her warm southern nature had been kindled by the story of his wrongs.
Day by day the sight of his helpless suffering had increased her
indignation toward those whom she really believed to have bitterly
wronged him. Through those long quiet days and silent nights, she had
brooded upon them. She never for one moment repented of having allied
herself to that wild oath of vengeance, whose echoes often at dead of
night seemed still to ring in her ears. Her only fear was that he would
emerge from the fierce illness under which he was laboring, so weakened
and shaken, that the desire of his life should have passed from him. She
had grown to love this shrunken old man. In her girlhood she had heard
stories of him from her nurse, and man