“Thank you—­oh! thank you.”  This very faintly and brokenly.

“You see, you are one of the cases that prove that an impossibility is—­possible.  Truth-stronger-than-fiction idea.  But if you would like me to communicate with Pat, I’ll be glad to help you.”

“No—­I will wait now.”  Joan drew her lips close.

Cameron controlled his features while he listened, but he never referred to Pat again.

“I’ve sometimes thought,” Cameron spoke calmly, “that you might have been looking for my uncle, Doctor Martin, when you stumbled into his old office.  I could not flatter myself that you were bent upon obtaining my services.”

At this Joan astonished Cameron almost as much as if she had sat up in her coffin.

She rose, as though propelled by a spring, she stared at him and then, as slowly, sank back, still holding him with her eyes that seemed preternaturally large.

“Oh! come now!” Cameron exclaimed.  “What’s up?” He took her hand and bent over her and to his amaze discovered that she was laughing!  He touched the bell.  Things were bewildering him—­Miss Brown always managed trying situations by reducing them to normal.  She responded at once; cool, serene, and capable.

“Nerves?” she asked.  And then took command.  She raised Joan and settled the pillows into new lines; she removed the roses almost sternly—­she disliked the nuisance of flowers in a sick room.

“There, now!” she whispered to Joan, “take this drink and go to sleep like a good girl.”

In the face of this sound common sense laughing was out of the question.  Joan pretended sleep rather than risk another:  “There, now!”

But her recovery was rapid after that day.  Like a veil withdrawn she reflected upon the past as if it were, not a story that was told, but a preface to the real story that her life must be.

The folly, the irresponsibility, no longer dismayed her, but gave her reasons and arguments.

She wanted to live at last!  She wanted to go home and separate herself forever from the cheap, theatrical thing she had believed was freedom!  She saw the folly of it all; she seemed an old woman regarding the dangerous passage of a younger one.

She realized her own selfishness in her demand for self-expression.  What had she expressed while others fixed their faithful eyes on duty?

Nancy shone high and clear in those dull hospital days.  Nancy who demanded so little, but who trod, with divine patience, the truer course.

“Well, Nan shall have her own!” Joan thought, and gripped her thin hands under the bedclothes.  “I’ll strive for Nan as I never have for myself.”

Out of the debris of the feverish past Joan held alone to Patricia.  Strange, it seemed to her, that the dead girl should have grown to such importance, but so it was.  Patricia was the real, the sacred thing, and she planned the home-bringing of the dear body and the placing of it on the hillside in The Gap.