“I am so glad,” she told him weakly.  “I was—­so dreadfully afraid.  I—­I had to go with her, Mr. Studley.  I do hope everyone understands.”

“Everyone does,” he made answer gently.  “Now let me give you this, and then you must sleep too.”

She drank from the cup he held, and felt revived.

He did not speak again till she had finished; then he leaned slightly towards her, and spoke with great earnestness.  “Miss Bathurst, do you realize, I wonder, that you saved my sister’s life by going with her?  I do; and I shall never forget it.”

She was sure now that she caught the gleam of tears in the grey eyes.  She slipped her hands out to him.  “I only did what I could,” she murmured confusedly.  “Anyone would have done it.  And please, Mr. Greatheart, will you call me Dinah?”

“Or Mercy?” he suggested smiling, her hands clasped close in his.

She smiled back with shy confidence.  The memory of her dream was in her mind, but she could not tell him of that.

“No,” she said.  “Just Dinah.  I’m not nice enough to be called anything else.  And thank you—­thank you for being so good to me.”

“My dear child,” he made quiet reply, “no one who really knows you could be anything else.”

“Oh, don’t you think they could?” said Dinah wistfully.  “I wish there were more people in the world like you.”

“No one ever thought of saying that to me before,” said Scott.

CHAPTER XXII

THE VALLEY OF THE SHADOW

After that interview with Scott there followed a long, long period of pain and weakness for Dinah.  She who had never known before what it meant to be ill went down to the Valley of the Shadow and lingered there for many days and nights.  And there came a time when those who watched beside her began to despair of her ever turning back.

So completely had she lost touch with the ordinary things of life that she knew but little of what went on around her, dwelling as it were apart, conscious sometimes of agonizing pain, but more often of a dreadful sinking as of one overwhelmed in the billows of an everlasting sea.  At such times she would cling piteously to any succouring hand, crying to them to hold her up—­only to hold her up.  And if the hand were the hand of Greatheart, she always found comfort at length and a sense of security that none other could impart.

Her fancy played about him very curiously in those days.  She saw him in many guises,—­as prince, as knight, as magician; but never as the mean and insignificant figure which first had caught her attention on that sunny morning before the fancy-dress ball.

This man who sat beside her bed of suffering for hours together because she fretted when he went away, who held her up when the gathering billows threatened to overwhelm her fainting soul, who prayed for her with the utmost simplicity when she told him piteously that she could not pray for herself, this man was above and beyond all ordinary standards.  She looked up to him with reverence, as one of colossal strength who had power with God.