for on the
morrow he was restless and ill, and within a week the deadly fever of
the place had him in its clutches. The boy nursed him and the German
doctor came up from Attra and, when he learnt who his patient was, took
up his quarters in the place. But for all his care and the boy's nursing
things went badly with Scarlett Trent.

To him ended for a while all measure of days--time became one long
night, full of strange, tormenting flashes of thought, passing like red
fire before his burning eyes. Sometimes it was Monty crying to him from
the bush, sometimes the yelling of those savages at Bekwando seemed to
fill the air, sometimes Ernestine was there, listening to his passionate
pleading with cold, set face, In the dead of night he saw her and the
still silence was broken by his hoarse, passionate cries, which they
strove in vain to check. And when at last he lay white and still with
exhaustion, the doctor looked at the boy and softly shook his head. He
had very little hope.

Trent grew worse. In those rare flashes of semi-consciousness which
sometimes come to the fever-stricken, he reckoned himself a dying man
and contemplated the end of all things without enthusiasm and without
regret. The one and only failure of his life had eaten like canker into
his heart. It was death he craved for in the hot, burning nights, and
death came and sat, a grisly shadow, at his pillow. The doctor and the
boy did their best, but it was not they who saved him.

There came a night when he raved, and the sound of a woman's name rang
out from the open windows of the little bungalow, rang out through the
drawn mosquito netting amongst the palm-trees, across the surf-topped
sea to the great steamer which lay in the bay. Perhaps she heard
it--perhaps after all it was a fancy. Only, in the midst of his fever,
a hand as soft as velvet and as cool as the night sea-wind touched his
forehead, and a voice sounded in his ears so sweetly that the blood
burned no longer in his veins, so sweetly that he lay back upon his
pillow like a man under the influence of a strong narcotic and slept.
Then the doctor smiled and the boy sobbed.

"I came," she said softly, "because it was the only atonement I could
make. I ought to have trusted you. Do you know, even my father told me
that."

"I have made mistakes," he said, "and of course behaved badly to him."

"Now that everything has been explained," she said, "I scarcely see what
else you could have do