The next day she was ill, unaccountably feverish and in great pain.  Hers was one of those natures—­happy natures, it may perhaps be said—­which hasten always to a crisis.  She had nothing of that miserable temperament which is never either better or worse, and remains clouded with slow disease for months or years.  She managed to do her work, but on the following morning she was delirious.  She remembered nothing more till one afternoon when she seemed to wake.  She looked up, and whose face was that which bent over her?  It was Miss Tippit’s.  Miss Tippit had learned through the doctor what was the state of affairs, and had managed, notwithstanding the demand which the lodgings made upon her, to take her share in watching over the sufferer.  Her stepmother had been summoned from Cowfold, and these two, with the landlady, had tended her and had brought her back to life.  In an instant the scene in Miss Tippit’s room when she was sick passed through Miriam’s brain, and she sobbed piteously, lifted up her arms as if to clasp her heroic benefactor, but the thought was too great for her, and she fainted.  Nevertheless she was recovering, and when she came to herself again, Miss Tippit was ready with the intervention of some trifle to distract her attention.  As her strength returned she was able to talk a little, and her first question was—­

“Miss Tippit, why did you come here?  Oh, if you but knew!  What claim have I on you?”

“Hush, my dear; those days are past.  You did not love me then perhaps; but what of that?  I am sure, you will not mind my saying it:  ’If ye love them which love you, what reward have ye? do not even the publicans the same?’ But I know you did love me really.”

“Where is Andrew?”

“Quite well, at home in Cowfold.”

That was as much as Miriam could stand then.  For weeks to come she was well-nigh drained of all vitality, and it flowed into her gradually and with many relapses.  The doctor thought she ought to be moved into the country.  Mrs. Tacchi had some friends in one of the villages lying by the side of the Avon in Wiltshire, just where that part of Salisbury Plain on which stands Stonehenge slopes down to the river.  Miriam knew nothing of the history of the Amesbury valley, but she was sensible—­as who must not be?—­to its exquisite beauty and the delicacy of the contrasts between the downs and the richly-foliaged fields through which the Avon winds.  It is a chalk river, clear as a chalk river always is if unpolluted; the downs are chalk, and though they are wide-sweeping and treeless, save for clusters of beech here and there on the heights, the dale with its water, meadows, cattle, and dense woods, so different from the uplands above them, is in peculiar and lovely harmony with them.