warm beside her,
and...

She sprang up guiltily. Had she been asleep...what if he had passed
while she slept...she grew cold at the thought.

"Did he pass, Nap?" she whispered to the dog, almost crying. "Oh Nap,
did we let him go past?"

Nap yawned widely and flicked one ear, which was his way of telling
Pearl not to distress herself. Nobody had passed.

Pearl's eyes were heavy with sleep.

"This is not the time to sleep," she said, yawning and shivering.
Arthur's wash-basin stood on the floor beside the bed, where she had
been bathing his face. She put more water into it.

"Now then," she said, "once for his mother, once for his father, a big
long one for Thursa," holding her head so long below the water that it
felt numb, when she took it out. "I can't do one for each of the boys,"
she shivered, "I'll lump the boys, here's a big one for them."

"There now," her teeth chattered as she wiped her hair on Arthur's
towel, "that ought to help some."

Arthur opened his eyes and looked anxiously around him. Pearl was
beside him at once.

"Pearl," he said, "what is wrong with me? What terrible pain is this
that has me in its clutches?" The strength had gone out of the man, he
could no longer battle with it.

Pearl hesitated. It is not well to tell sick people your gravest fears.
"Still Arthur is English, and the English are gritty," Pearl thought to
herself.

"Arthur," she said, "I think you have appendicitis."

Arthur lay motionless for a few moments. He knew what that was.

"But that requires an operation," he said at length, "a very skilful
one."

"It does," Pearl replied, "and that's what you'll get as soon as Dr.
Clay gets here, I'm thinking."

Arthur turned his face into his pillow. An operation for appendicitis,
here, in this place, and by that young man, no older than himself
perhaps? He knew that at home, it was only undertaken by the oldest and
best surgeons in the hospitals.

Pearl saw something of his fears in his face. So she hastened to
reassure him. She said cheerfully:

"Don't ye be worried, Arthur, about it at all at all. Man alive! Dr.
Clay thinks no more of an operation like that than I would o' cuttin'
your nails."

A strange feeling began at Arthur's heart, and spread up to his brain.
It had come! It was here!

From lightning and tempest; from plague, pestilence
and famine; from battle and murder and sudden
death;--Good Lord, deliver us!

He had prayed it many times, m