ell,
there was no use waiting; he had come into that house, he scarce knew
how; if they were to thrust him forth again, it had best be done at
once; and he moved to the door of the back room and entered.

O, well--then he was insane, as he had long believed.

There, in his father's room, at midnight, the fire was roaring, and the
gas blazing; the papers, the sacred papers--to lay a hand on which was
criminal--had all been taken off and piled along the floor; a cloth was
spread, and a supper laid, upon the business table; and in his father's
chair a woman, habited like a nun, sat eating. As he appeared in the
doorway, the nun rose, gave a low cry, and stood staring. She was a
large woman, strong, calm, a little masculine, her features marked with
courage and good sense; and as John blinked back at her, a faint
resemblance dodged about his memory, as when a tune haunts us, and yet
will not be recalled.

"Why, it's John!" cried the nun.

"I daresay I'm mad," said John, unconsciously following King Lear; "but,
upon my word, I do believe you're Flora."

"Of course I am," replied she.

And yet it is not Flora at all, thought John; Flora was slender, and
timid, and of changing colour, and dewy-eyed; and had Flora such an
Edinburgh accent? But he said none of these things, which was perhaps as
well. What he said was, "Then why are you a nun?"

"Such nonsense!" said Flora. "I'm a sick-nurse; and I am here nursing
your sister, with whom, between you and me, there is precious little the
matter. But that is not the question. The point is: How do you come
here? and are you not ashamed to show yourself?"

"Flora," said John sepulchrally, "I haven't eaten anything for three
days. Or, at least, I don't know what day it is; but I guess I'm
starving."

"You unhappy man!" she cried. "Here, sit down and eat my supper; and
I'll just run upstairs and see my patient; not but what I doubt she's
fast asleep, for Maria is a _malade imadginaire_."

With this specimen of the French, not of Stratford-atte-Bowe, but of a
finishing establishment in Moray Place, she left John alone in his
father's sanctum. He fell at once upon the food; and it is to be
supposed that Flora had found her patient wakeful, and been detained
with some details of nursing, for he had time to make a full end of all
there was to eat, and not only to empty the teapot, but to fill it again
from a kettle that was fitfully singing on his father's fire. Then he
sat tor