Four hours later Anne Linton opened her eyes, after an interval of unconsciousness which had seemed to the nurse who looked in now and then less like a sleep than a stupor, to find a pair of broad shoulders within her immediate horizon, and to feel the same lightly firm pressure on her wrist that she had felt before that afternoon.  She looked up slowly into Burns’s eyes.

“Not so bad, is it?” said his low and reassuring voice.  “Bed more comfortable than doctor’s office chairs?  Won’t mind if you don’t ring any door bells to-morrow?  Just let everything go and don’t worry—­and you’ll be all right.”

“This room—­” began the weary young voice—­she was really much more weary now that she had stopped trying to keep up than seemed at all reasonable—­“I can’t possibly—­”

“It’s just the place for you.  Don’t do any thinking on that point.  You know you agreed to take my orders, and this is one of them.”

“But I can’t possibly—­”

“I said they were my orders,” repeated Burns.  “But that was a misstatement.  They’re the orders of some one else, more powerful than I am under this roof—­and that’s saying something, I assure you.  I think you’ll have to meet my wife.  She’s come on purpose to see you.  She was away when you were at the office.”

He beckoned, and another figure moved quietly into range of the brown eyes which were smoldering with the first advances of the fever.  This figure came around to the other side of the narrow high bed and sat down beside it.  Miss Linton looked into the face, as it seemed to her, of one of the most attractive women she had ever seen.  It was a face which looked down at her with the sweetest sympathy in its expression, and yet with that same high cheer which was in the face of the man on the other side of the bed.

“My dear little girl,” said a low, rich voice, “this is my room, and I often have the pleasure of seeing my special friends use it.  And I come to see them here.  When you are getting well, as you will be by and by, I can have much nicer talks with you than if you were in a ward.  Now that you understand, you will let me have my way?”.

The burning brown eyes looked into the soft black ones for a full minute, then, with a long-drawn breath, the tense expression in the stranger’s relaxed.  “I see,” said the weary voice.  “You are used to having your way—­just as he is.  I’ll have to let you because I haven’t any strength left to fight with.  You are wonderfully kind.  But—­I’m not a little girl.”

Ellen Burns smiled.  “We’ll play you are, for a while,” she said.  “And—­I want you to know that, little or big, you are my friend.  So now you have both Doctor Burns and me, and you are not alone any more.”

The heavy lashes closed over the brown eyes, and the lids were held tightly shut as if to keep tears back.  Seeing this, Ellen rose.

“Red,” she said, “are you going to let us have Miss Arden?”