ab followed. We put her to bed. James took off his
heavy shoes, crammed with tackets, heel-capped and toe-capped, and put
them carefully under the table, saying: "Maister John, I'm for nane o'
yer strynge nurse bodies for Ailie. I'll be her nurse, and I'll gang
aboot on my stockin' soles as canny as pussy." And so he did;
and handy and clever, and swift and tender as any woman was that
horny-handed, snell, peremptory little man. Everything she got he gave
her; he seldom slept; and often I saw his small, shrewd eyes out of
the darkness, fixed on her. As before, they spoke little.

Rab behaved well, never moving, showing us how meek and gentle he
could be, and occasionally, in his sleep, letting us know that he
was demolishing some adversary. He took a walk with me every day,
generally to the Candlemaker Row; but he was sombre and mild; declined
doing battle, though some fit cases offered, and indeed submitted to
sundry indignities; and was always very ready to turn, and came faster
back, and trotted up the stair with much lightness, and went straight
to that door.

Jess, the mare, had been sent, with her weather-beaten cart, to
Howgate, and had doubtless her own dim and placid meditations and
confusions on the absence of her master and Rab and her unnatural
freedom from the road and her cart.

For some days Ailie did well. The wound healed "by the first
intention"; for as James said, "Oor Ailie's skin's ower clean to
beil." The students came in quiet and anxious, and surrounded her
bed. She said she liked to see their young, honest faces. The surgeon
dressed her, and spoke to her in his own short, kind way, pitying her
through his eyes, Rab and James outside the circle--Rab being now
reconciled, and even cordial, and having made up his mind that as yet
nobody required worrying, but, as you may suppose, _semper paratus_.

So far well; but, four days after the operation, my patient had a
sudden and long shivering, a "groosin," as she called it. I saw her
soon after; her eyes were too bright, her cheek colored; she was
restless, and ashamed of being so; the balance was lost; mischief had
begun. On looking at the wound, a blush of red told the secret; her
pulse was rapid, her breathing anxious and quick; she wasn't herself,
as she said, and was vexed at her restlessness. We tried what we
could. James did everything, was everywhere, never in the way, never
out of it; Rab subsided under the table into a dark place, and was