nt, and sleep like the
heroine you are for many hours."

Jacqueline demurred indignantly. "Leave him? Indeed I won't! It's my
place to nurse him, not yours. Go to sleep yourself!"

He did not venture to drive Woman out of her natural sphere.

"As you like. Just rest on one of these cots, then, while I attend to
some further matters. I shall rouse you when I am ready to leave."

"You won't go far?"

"Oh, no. I shall be within call."

Jacqueline stretched herself luxuriously. The cot was very comfortable.
"I shan't go to sleep, of course," she said....

Once during the night she stirred suddenly. "Philip will be worried,"
she murmured.

A quiet voice answered beside her, "No, I shall send word to him."

She lifted her heavy lids. "Oh, is that you, Phil?" she muttered
contentedly, and dozed off again....

It was not such an odd mistake. The school-teacher, sitting there beside
her, had taken off his spectacles, and the eyes she met when hers
opened, were eyes she had known and trusted all her life; gleaming,
kindly, quizzical eyes, astonishingly blue by contrast with a dark face.

He tried not to cough for fear of disturbing her. Until dawn and
afterwards he sat there between the two beds, sometimes rising quietly
to minister to Channing's needs, but for the most part gazing at the
sleeping girl, hungrily, wistfully, often through a mist of tears;
searching for resemblances, and finding them.

"Her child!" he whispered to himself. "Her little girl, the babe that
was on her breast!--So like, and yet unlike. A hint of pliancy here, of
weakness perhaps, that is not Kate. Wilfulness with Kate, never
weakness--And already a woman, already come to the time of sacrifice.
Her little girl!--"

He leaned over Channing, studying intently and anxiously the nervous,
sensuous, intelligent face in its betraying relaxation of slumber. He
shook his head presently, as if in doubt.

"But she will not see; perhaps she will never see. Yes, she is Kate's
own child!" He sighed, and shrugged.

"At least there is Philip on guard," he said to himself, finally. "My
sturdy, pious young Atlas, with the world so heavy on his shoulders!--"

The smile on the teacher's lips was mocking and sad, and very tender.

CHAPTER XXIX

It was broad daylight when Jacqueline was awakened by some one calling
her by name, and shaking her none too gently.

"Come, come, Jacqueline, you must wake up, please! I have no time to
waste."

She