“That’s nothing to you, Miss; my gal Maud has a head on her shoulders, and can keep an eye on the place downstairs.  Besides, I’ve allus found that at a pinch things will bear a lot of squeezing.  I remember when my good man were laid up with the low fever for six weeks, and I had a baby a month old, I thought to myself as I should be beaten; but Lord, I was young then, and didn’t know how much squeezing things will take, and I just squeezed through somehow.”

“He ain’t very strong, is he?” continued Mrs. Joll.  “I don’t mean in his constitution, but here,” and she tapped her head.  “Likes a drop or two now and then?”

Miriam was silent.

“Ah! well, as I said about Joll’s brother when I was a-nussing of him—­he was rather a bad lot—­it’s nothing to me when people are ill what they are.  Besides; there ain’t so much difference ’twixt any of us.”

The night came.  Miriam rose and went down to her brother’s room.  She tried to read, but she could not, and her thoughts were incessantly occupied with her own troubles.  Andrew lay stretched before her—­he might be dying for aught she knew; and yet the prospect of his death disturbed her only so far as it interfered with herself.  Montgomery was for ever in her mind.  What was he that he should set the soul of this girl alight!  He was nothing, but she was something, and he had by some curious and altogether unaccountable quality managed to wake her slumbering forces.

She was in love with him, but it was not desire alone which had tired her, and made her pace up and down Andrew’s sick chamber.  Thousands of men with the blackest hair, the most piercing eyes, might have passed before her, and she would have remained unmoved.  Neither was it love as some select souls understand it.  She did not know what it was which stirred her; she was hungry, mad, she could not tell why.  Nobody could have predicted beforehand that Montgomery was the man to act upon this girl so miraculously—­nobody could tell, seeing the two together, what it was in him which specially excited her—­nobody who has made men and women, his study would have wasted much time in the inquiry, knowing that the affinities, attractions, and repulsions of men and women are beyond all our science.

Brutally selfish is love, although so heroically self-sacrificing.  Miriam thought that if Andrew had not been such an idiot, the relationship with Montgomery might have remained undisturbed.  He might still have continued to call, but how could she see him now?  The sufferer lay there unconscious, pleading for pity, as everything lifeless or unconscious seems to plead—­no dead dog in a kennel fails to be tragic; but Miriam actually hated her brother, and cursed him in her heart as a stone over which she had stumbled in the pursuit; of something madly coveted but flying before her.