at home in the best bed in your father's house at Deptford.
And you've had the plague-fever. And you're better. Or ought to be. But
if you don't know your own old nurse----"

"I never 'ad no nurse," said Dickie, "old nor new. So there. You're
a-takin' me for some other chap, that's what it is. Where did you get
hold of me? I never bin here before."

"Don't wander, I tell you," repeated the nurse briskly. "You lie still
and think, and you'll see you'll remember me very well. Forget your old
nurse--why, you will tell me next that you've forgotten your own name."

"No, I haven't," said Dickie.

"What is it, then?" the nurse asked, laughing a fat, comfortable laugh.

Dickie's reply was naturally "Dickie Harding."

"Why," said the nurse, opening wide eyes at him under gray brows, "you
_have_ forgotten it. They do say that the fever hurts the memory, but
this beats all. Dost mean to tell me the fever has mazed thy poor brains
till thou don't know that thy name's Richard ----?" And Dickie heard her
name a name that did not sound to him at all like Harding.

"Is that my name?" he asked.

"It is indeed," she answered.

Dickie felt an odd sensation of fixedness. He had expected when he went
to sleep that the dream would, in sleep, end, and that he would wake to
find himself alone in the empty house at New Cross. But he had wakened
to the same dream once more, and now he began to wonder whether he
really belonged here, and whether this were the real life, and the
other--the old, sordid, dirty New Cross life--merely a horrid dream, the
consequence of his fever. He lay and thought, and looked at the rich,
pleasant room, the kind, clear face of the nurse, the green, green
branches of the trees, the tapestry and the rushes. At last he spoke.

"Nurse," said he.

"Ah! I thought you'd come to yourself," she said. "What is it, my
dearie?"

"If I am really the name you said, I've forgotten it. Tell me all about
myself, will you, Nurse?"

"I thought as much," she muttered, and then began to tell him wonderful
things.

She told him how his father was Sir Richard--the King had made him a
knight only last year--and how this place where they now were was his
father's country house. "It lies," said the nurse, "among the pleasant
fields and orchards of Deptford." And how he, Dickie, had been very sick
of the pestilential fever, but was now, thanks to the blessing and to
the ministrations of good Dr. Carey, on the highroad to heal