For three days and nights Idris had not moved from my side.  She administered to all my wants, and never slept nor rested.  She did not hope; and therefore she neither endeavoured to read the physician’s countenance, nor to watch for symptoms of recovery.  All her thought was to attend on me to the last, and then to lie down and die beside me.  On the third night animation was suspended; to the eye and touch of all I was dead.  With earnest prayer, almost with force, Adrian tried to draw Idris from me.  He exhausted every adjuration, her child’s welfare and his own.  She shook her head, and wiped a stealing tear from her sunk cheek, but would not yield; she entreated to be allowed to watch me that one night only, with such affliction and meek earnestness, that she gained her point, and sat silent and motionless, except when, stung by intolerable remembrance, she kissed my closed eyes and pallid lips, and pressed my stiffening hands to her beating heart.

At dead of night, when, though it was mid winter, the cock crowed at three o’clock, as herald of the morning change, while hanging over me, and mourning in silent, bitter thought for the loss of all of love towards her that had been enshrined in my heart; her dishevelled hair hung over her face, and the long tresses fell on the bed; she saw one ringlet in motion, and the scattered hair slightly stirred, as by a breath.  It is not so, she thought, for he will never breathe more.  Several times the same thing occurred, and she only marked it by the same reflection; till the whole ringlet waved back, and she thought she saw my breast heave.  Her first emotion was deadly fear, cold dew stood on her brow; my eyes half opened; and, re-assured, she would have exclaimed, “He lives!” but the words were choked by a spasm, and she fell with a groan on the floor.

Adrian was in the chamber.  After long watching, he had unwillingly fallen into a sleep.  He started up, and beheld his sister senseless on the earth, weltering in a stream of blood that gushed from her mouth.  Encreasing signs of life in me in some degree explained her state; the surprise, the burst of joy, the revulsion of every sentiment, had been too much for her frame, worn by long months of care, late shattered by every species of woe and toil.  She was now in far greater danger than I, the wheels and springs of my life, once again set in motion, acquired elasticity from their short suspension.  For a long time, no one believed that I should indeed continue to live; during the reign of the plague upon earth, not one person, attacked by the grim disease, had recovered.  My restoration was looked on as a deception; every moment it was expected that the evil symptoms would recur with redoubled violence, until confirmed convalescence, absence of all fever or pain, and encreasing strength, brought slow conviction that I had recovered from the plague.