The door closed and Magdalen was alone again.  She felt no sense of solitude; Captain Wragge had left her with something new to think of.  Hour after hour her mind dwelt wonderingly on Mr. Kirke, until the evening came, and she heard his voice again through the half-opened door.

“I am very grateful,” she said to him, before the nurse could answer his inquiries—­“very, very grateful for all your goodness to me.”

“Try to get well,” he replied, kindly.  “You will more than reward me, if you try to get well.”

The next morning Mr. Merrick found her impatient to leave her bed, and be moved to the sofa in the front room.  The doctor said he supposed she wanted a change.  “Yes,” she replied; “I want to see Mr. Kirke.”  The doctor consented to move her on the next day, but he positively forbade the additional excitement of seeing anybody until the day after.  She attempted a remonstrance—­Mr. Merrick was impenetrable.  She tried, when he was gone, to win the nurse by persuasion—­the nurse was impenetrable, too.

On the next day they wrapped her in shawls, and carried her in to the sofa, and made her a little bed on it.  On the table near at hand were some flowers and a number of an illustrated paper.  She immediately asked who had put them there.  The nurse (failing to notice a warning look from the doctor) said Mr. Kirke had thought that she might like the flowers, and that the pictures in the paper might amuse her.  After that reply, her anxiety to see Mr. Kirke became too ungovernable to be trifled with.  The doctor left the room at once to fetch him.

She looked eagerly at the opening door.  Her first glance at him as he came in raised a doubt in her mind whether she now saw that tall figure and that open sun-burned face for the first time.  But she was too weak and too agitated to follow her recollections as far back as Aldborough.  She resigned the attempt, and only looked at him.  He stopped at the foot of the sofa and said a few cheering words.  She beckoned to him to come nearer, and offered him her wasted hand.  He tenderly took it in his, and sat down by her.  They were both silent.  His face told her of the sorrow and the sympathy which his silence would fain have concealed.  She still held his hand—­consciously now—­as persistently as she had held it on the day when he found her.  Her eyes closed, after a vain effort to speak to him, and the tears rolled slowly over her wan white cheeks.

The doctor signed to Kirke to wait and give her time.  She recovered a little and looked at him.  “How kind you have been to me!” she murmured.  “And how little I have deserved it!”

“Hush! hush!” he said.  “You don’t know what a happiness it was to me to help you.”

The sound of his voice seemed to strengthen her, and to give her courage.  She lay looking at him with an eager interest, with a gratitude which artlessly ignored all the conventional restraints that interpose between a woman and a man.  “Where did you see me,” she said, suddenly, “before you found me here?”