I had at least secured isolation for myself and my patient.  But why had I been eager to do so?  I could not answer that question to myself, and I did not ponder over it many minutes.  I was impatient, yet strangely reluctant, to look at the sick girl again, after the loss of her beautiful hair.  It was still daylight.  The change in her appearance struck me as singular.  Her face before had a look of suffering and trouble, making it almost old, charming as it was; now she had the aspect of quite a young girl, scarcely touching upon womanhood.  Her hair had not been shorn off closely—­the woman could not manage that—­and short, wavy tresses, like those of a young child, were curling about her exquisitely-shaped head.  The white temples, with their blue, throbbing veins, were more visible, with the small, delicately-shaped ears.  I should have guessed her age now as barely fifteen—­almost that of a child.  Thus changed, I felt more myself in her presence, more as I should have been in attendance upon any child.  I scanned her face narrowly, and it struck me that there was a perceptible alteration; an expression of exhaustion or repose was creeping over it.  The crisis of the fever was at hand.  The repose of death or the wholesome sleep of returning health was not far off.  Mother Renouf saw it as well as myself.

CHAPTER THE SIXTH.

WHO IS SHE?

We sat up again together that night, Tardif and I. He would not smoke, lest the scent of the tobacco should get in through the crevices of the door, and lessen the girl’s chance of sleep; but he held his pipe between his teeth, taking an imaginary puff now and then, that he might keep himself wide awake.  We talked to one another in whispers.

“Tell me all you know about mam’zelle,” I said.  He had been chary of his knowledge before, but his heart seemed open at this moment.  Most hearts are more open at midnight than at any other hour.

“There’s not much to tell, doctor,” he answered.  “Her name is Ollivier, as I said to you; but she does not think she is any kin to the Olliviers of Guernsey.  She is poor, though she does not look as if she had been born poor, does she?”

“Not in the least degree,” I said.  “If she is not a lady of birth, she is one of the first specimens of Nature’s gentlefolks I have ever come across.”

“Ah, there is a difference!” he said, sighing.  “I feel it, doctor, in every word I speak to her, and every step I walk with her eyes upon me.  Why cannot I be like her, or like you?  You’ll be on a level with her, and I am down far below her.”

I looked at him curiously.  The slouching figure—­well shaped as it was—­the rough, knotted hands, the unkempt mass of hair about his head and face, marked him for what he was—­a toiler on the sea as well as on the land.  He understood my scrutiny, and colored under it like a girl.

“You are a better fellow than I am, Tardif,” I said; “but that has nothing to do with our talk.  I think we ought to communicate with the young lady’s friends, whoever they may be, as soon as there are any means of communicating with the rest of the world.  We should be in a fix if any thing should happen to her.  Have you no clew to her friends?”