the sea was delightfully smooth. Galt Roscoe still slept, though his
temperature was high.

My conference with Mrs. Falchion after breakfast was brief, but
satisfactory. I told her frankly that Roscoe had been delirious, that he
had mentioned her name, and that I thought it best to reduce the number
of nurses and watchers. I made my proposition about Justine Caron. She
shook her head a little impatiently, and said that Justine had told her,
and that she was quite willing. Then I asked her if she would not also
assist. She answered immediately that she wished to do so. As if to
make me understand why she did it, she added: "If I did not hear the
wild things he says, some one else would; and the difference is that
I understand them, and the some one else would interpret them with
the genius of the writer of a fairy book."

And so it happened that Mrs. Falchion came to sit many hours a day beside
the sick couch of Galt Roscoe, moistening his lips, cooling his brow,
giving him his medicine. After the first day, when she was, I thought,
alternating between innate disgust of misery and her womanliness and
humanity,--in these days more a reality to me,--she grew watchful and
silently solicitous at every turn of the malady. What impressed me most
was that she was interested and engrossed more, it seemed, in the malady
than in the man himself.

And yet she baffled me even when I had come to this conclusion.

During most of his delirium she remained almost impassive, as if she had
schooled herself to be calm and strong in nerve; but one afternoon she
did a thing that upset all my opinions of her for a moment. Looking
straight at her with staring, unconscious eyes, he half rose in his bed,