Eighteen days! The figure terrified Lupin. He felt that all was over,
that he would never be able to recover his strength and resume the
struggle and that Gilbert and Vaucheray were doomed... His brain slipped
away from him. The fever returned and the delirium.

And more days came and went. It was perhaps the time of his life of
which Lupin speaks with the greatest horror. He retained just enough
consciousness and had sufficiently lucid moments to realize the position
exactly. But he was not able to coordinate his ideas, to follow a line
of argument nor to instruct or forbid his friends to adopt this or that
line of conduct.

Often, when he emerged from his torpor, he found his hand in Clarisse's
and, in that half-slumbering condition in which a fever keeps you, he
would address strange words to her, words of love and passion, imploring
her and thanking her and blessing her for all the light and joy which
she had brought into his darkness.

Then, growing calmer and not fully understanding what he had said, he
tried to jest:

"I have been delirious, have I not? What a heap of nonsense I must have
talked!"

But Lupin felt by Clarisse's silence that he could safely talk as much
nonsense as ever his fever suggested to him. She did not hear. The
care and attention which she lavished on the patient, her devotion, her
vigilance, her alarm at the least relapse: all this was meant not for
him, but for the possible saviour of Gilbert. She anxiously watched the
progress of his convalescence. How soon would he be fit to resume the
campaign? Was it not madness to linger by his side, when every day
carried away a little hope?

Lupin never ceased repeating to himself, with the inward belief that, by
so doing, he could influence the course of his illness:

"I will get well... I will get well..."

And he lay for days on end without moving, so as not to disturb the
dressing of his wound nor increase the excitement of his nerves in the
smallest degree.

He also strove not to think of Daubrecq. But the image of his dire
adversary haunted him; and he reconstituted the various phases of the
escape, the descent of the cliff.... One day, struck by a terrible
memory, he exclaimed:

"The list! The list of the Twenty-seven! Daubrecq must have it by now...
or else d'Albufex. It was on the table!"

Clarisse reassured him:

"No one can have taken it," she declared. "The Growler was in Paris that
same day, with a note from me for Pra