were
successful; and it would not be easy to tell how the father, whom Theo
Carnegy had allowed herself to think and pronounce indifferent to his
children's welfare, suffered as he hung over the senseless form of his
best-beloved child. Her peril stirred up all the love that, though
undoubtedly existing, had been dormant. From that fateful hour,
however, the old sea-captain was an altered man. His heart awoke to
the fact that the chief place in it should be filled by his motherless
children, instead of, as it had been, by a mere hobby.

All through the hours of the anxious night that followed he went from
one bed to the other, tending the occupants with that gentleness,
almost womanly, which a sailor possesses in no ordinary degree. For
Queenie there were no apprehensions, save dread of a chill from the
wetting she received; the child was tranquil, and appeared to have
sustained no shock.

'We said "Our Father," me and Theo,' she whispered innocently to the
captain, as he sat by her little bed holding her hands, 'and He sent
Geoff and Binks directly to pick us out of the water; and then Theo
went off to sleep in the boat, and my new shoes is spoilt most
dreadful!'

With Theo it was otherwise. She had sustained a severe mental shock,
as well as the bodily strain, in her fruitless efforts to pull the
heavy boat through the water. And it had been a terrible spasm of
terror to sink slowly, helplessly, in the yawning waves, trying all the
time to hold up the precious little sister. When the doctor from
Brattlesby arrived, he looked grave enough over his elder patient; and
next day he was even more serious.

'She is in for brain fever!' he said briefly. He was a man of few
words, leaving the burden of conversation, as a rule, to his patients.
Hence, perhaps, it was that little Dr. Cobbe was the most popular
being, man or doctor, for miles round Northbourne.

And with regard to Theo it was as he said. For many weeks Theo Carnegy
lay battling for her life in the cruel clutches of the fever,
unconscious that her most devoted and tenderest nurse was the father
whom she had bitterly imagined thought more of his hobby than of his
boys and girls. All Northbourne, as with one heart, sorrowed aloud for
their favourite Miss Theedory; her grave condition was the sole theme
of talk in the cottages round the bay.

'Happen she was too good to live!' croaked Jerry Blunt's mother, with
an appropriate melancholy in her voice