After a two days’ trial of the rooms, the doctor and the trained nurse, who scornfully slept amid the collection, regarding it as a permanent centre of infection, declared the situation impossible, and with the slightest preliminary consultation of bewildered John, white-coated men were sent for, who carried Miriam to the hospital.  About her door John hung like a miserable debarred ghost, for after the first few days her mind wandered painfully, and his presence excited her dangerously.  For weeks he vacillated between perfunctory work at the office, unsatisfactory talks with busy doctors and impatient nurses, and long apprehensive hours in what had been home.  In “Little Venice,” in the best powder-blue jar and the rest, he found no solace, on the contrary, the occasion of revolting suggestions.  There was an imp that whispered that she must die and that he should resume collecting.  With horror he fled the evil place, and spent an endless night on tolerance within hearing of her moanings.

Fevers have this of merciful, that a term is set for them.  Her malady though it often maims cruelly rarely kills.  The temperature line on the chart, which for days had described a Himalaya, dwindled suddenly to a Sierra, as quickly to an Appalachian, and then became a level plain.  Terribly wracked by the ordeal but safe they pronounced her.  The visiting physician occasionally omitted her in his daily round.  But convalescence was more trying than the struggle with the fever.  The lethargic hours seldom brought either sleep or rest.  Beset by nervous fears, the collective suffering of the giant building weighed upon her, and she begged to be taken home.

It was a pathetic triumphal entry that she made among their household gods.  The sheer grotesqueness of her home struck her painfully for the first time, as she was helped to an ancient chair that stood before the suspended Kirman rug—­her throne John had always called it.  As she once more occupied it, there came a curious revulsion against her gorgeously shabby domain.  Other women, she reflected, had neat places, cool expanses of wallpaper, furniture seemly set apart.  She resented the stuffiness of it all, the air of musty preciousness that pervaded the room.  And when John took both her hands and said:  “Now the collection is itself again; the queen has come home,” she broke down and cried.  She did much of that in the weeks that followed.  You would have supposed her another person than plucky Miriam Baxter.  But the situation hardly made for cheerfulness.  Light housekeeping being no longer practicable, they depended on the unwilling ministrations of a slovenly maid.  John, who, to do him justice, had never boasted much surplus vitality, felt vaguely that something was now due from him that he could not supply.  To escape an inadequacy that was painful he drifted back to the exhibitions and sales, this time alone.  He never bought anything, for he was saving manfully for a purpose that daily increased in his mind.  He would pay with his pocketbook what with his person he could not.