said appeared to be true. The small island called Cloud Island,
where the pestilence was, and to which he had been invited, was not one
at which larger ships or schooners could land, so that it was only from
the harbour of another island that the seamen got their news. On all
hands it was known that there was bad disease upon Cloud Island, that no
doctor was there, and that there was one lady, a Madame Le Maitre, a
person of some property, who was devoting herself to nursing the sick.
When Caius asked who she was, and where she came from, one person said
one thing and one another. Some of the men told him that she was old,
some of them affirmed that she was young, and this, not because there
was supposed to be any mystery concerning her, but because no one seemed
to have taken sufficient interest in her existence to obtain accurate
information.

When Caius re-entered the gate of his father's farm he had decided to
risk the adventure, and obey the letter in all points precisely.

"Would you let it be said that in all these parts there was no one to
act the man but a woman?" he said to his father.

To his mother he described the sufferings that this disease would work,
all the details of its pains, and how little children and mothers and
wives would be the chief sufferers, dying in helpless pain, or being
bereft of those they loved best.

As he talked, the heart of the good woman rose up within her and blessed
her son, acknowledging, in spite of her natural desires, that he was in
this more truly the great man than she had fancied him in her wildest
dreams of opulence and renown. She credited him with far purer motives
than he knew himself to possess.

A father's rule over his own money is a very modified thing, the very
fact of true fatherhood making him only a partner with his child. Caius
was under the impression that his father could have refused him the
necessary outfit of medical stores for this expedition, but that was not
the way old Simpson looked at it.

"If he must, he must," he said to his wife angrily, gloomily, for his
own opinion in the matter had changed little; but to Caius he gave his
consent, and all the money he needed, and did not, except at first,
express his disapproval, so that Caius took the less pains to argue the
matter with him.

It was only at the last, when Caius had fairly set out on his journey,
and, having said good-bye, looked back to see his father stand at the
gate of his own f