ook up golf to fill in the time, too, but gave it up
when he found it made him thirstier than ever. And then, with
things so shaping up that he could rise in the morning without
having a drink to get up on, the Lindley Grants thought it best to
warn the girl's family before it was too late.

"He is a nice boy in some ways," Mrs. Lindley Grant had said on the
occasion of the warning; "but, like all drinking men, he is a broken
reed, eccentric and irresponsible. No daughter of mine could marry
him. I'd rather bury her. And if you want facts Lindley will give
them to you."

So the girl had sent back her ring and a cold little letter, and
Billy Grant had got roaring full at a club that night and presented
the ring to a cabman--all of which is exceedingly sordid, but rather
human after all.

The Nurse, having had no sleep for forty-eight hours, slept for
quite thirty minutes. She wakened at the end of that time and
started up with a horrible fear that the thing she was waiting for
had come. But Billy Grant was still alive, sleeping naturally, and
the thermometer, having been in place forty minutes, registered a
hundred and three.

At eight o'clock the interne, hurrying over in fresh ducks, with a
laudable desire to make the rounds before the Staff began to drop
in, found Billy Grant very still and with his eyes closed, and the
Nurse standing beside the bed, pale and tremulous.

"Why didn't you let me know?" he demanded, aggrieved. "I ought to
have been called. I told you----"

"He isn't dead," said the Nurse breathlessly. "He--I think he is
better."

Whereon she stumbled out of the room into her own little room across
the hall, locking the door behind her, and leaving the interne to
hunt the symptom record for himself--a thing not to be lightly
overlooked; though of course internes are not the Staff.

The interne looked over the record and whistled.

"Wouldn't that paralyse you!" he said under his breath. "'Pulse very
weak.' 'Pulse almost obliterated.' 'Very talkative.' 'Breathing hard
at four A.M. Cannot swallow.' And then: 'Sleeping calmly from five
o'clock.' 'Pulse stronger.' Temperature one hundred and three.' By
gad, that last prescription of mine was a hit!"

So now began a curious drama of convalescence in the little
isolation pavilion across the courtyard. Not for a minute did the
two people most concerned forget their strange relationship; not for
worlds would either have allowed the other to know that