“His pulse is very high,” she said to the steward.  “When did you take his temperature?” She drew a little morocco case from her pocket and from that took a clinical thermometer, which she shook up and down, eying the patient meanwhile with a calm, impersonal scrutiny.  The Lieutenant raised his head and stared up at the white figure beside his cot.  His eyes opened and then shut quickly, with a startled look, in which doubt struggled with wonderful happiness.  His hand stole out fearfully and warily until it touched her apron, and then, finding it was real, he clutched it desperately, and twisting his face and body toward her, pulled her down, clasping her hands in both of his, and pressing them close to his face and eyes and lips.  He put them from him for an instant, and looked at her through his tears.

“Sweetheart,” he whispered, “sweetheart, I knew you’d come.”

As the nurse knelt on the deck beside him, her thermometer slipped from her fingers and broke, and she gave an exclamation of annoyance.  The young Doctor picked up the pieces and tossed them overboard.  Neither of them spoke, but they smiled appreciatively.  The Lieutenant was looking at the nurse with the wonder and hope and hunger of soul in his eyes with which a dying man looks at the cross the priest holds up before him.  What he saw where the German nurse was kneeling was a tall, fair girl with great bands and masses of hair, with a head rising like a lily from a firm, white throat, set on broad shoulders above a straight back and sloping breast—­a tall, beautiful creature, half-girl, half-woman, who looked back at him shyly, but steadily.

“Listen,” he said.

The voice of the sick man was so sure and so sane that the young Doctor started, and moved nearer to the head of the cot.  “Listen, dearest,” the Lieutenant whispered.  “I wanted to tell you before I came South.  But I did not dare; and then I was afraid something might happen to me, and I could never tell you, and you would never know.  So I wrote it to you in the will I made at Baiquiri, the night before the landing.  If you hadn’t come now, you would have learned it in that way.  You would have read there that there never was any one but you; the rest were all dream people, foolish, silly—­mad.  There is no one else in the world but you; you have been the only thing in life that has counted.  I thought I might do something down here that would make you care.  But I got shot going up a hill, and after that I wasn’t able to do anything.  It was very hot, and the hills were on fire; and they took me prisoner, and kept me tied down here, burning on these coals.  I can’t live much longer, but now that I have told you I can have peace.  They tried to kill me before you came; but they didn’t know I loved you, they didn’t know that men who love you can’t die.  They tried to starve my love for you, to burn it out of me; they tried to reach it with their knives.  But my love for you is my soul, and they can’t kill a man’s soul.  Dear heart, I have lived because you lived.  Now that you know—­now that you understand—­what does it matter?”