“What question, dear?” she queried softly.

“The question I asked you just before you left Redford.”

“I don’t remember—­Oh!”

“Yes—­that one.  But if you consented, I might recover—­it would be enough to make me; then you would repent.”

She was silent, agitated in every fibre of her, but thinking hard.

“What put that idea into your head?” she whispered, still holding his hand.

“It was never put in; it was there always—­since you were a kiddie.”

“It seems so strange!  I thought I was always a kiddie to you.”  “That does seem the natural relationship, doesn’t it?” There fell another long silence, and, listening to his dragging breath, her heart smote her.  She squeezed his bony hand.

“I will stay with you, anyway,” she comforted him.

He turned his head on the pillow.  “Kiss me,” he sighed, with eyes closed.

She did, again and again.

The night was suffocating.  She could not sleep for the heat and her thoughts, and when, towards morning, she heard the nurse stirring, she got up to inquire how he was.

“Pretty bad,” the nurse said.  “It’s this awful weather.  I can’t cool the room, though I’ve got all the doors and windows open, and the wet sheets hanging up.  It’s air he wants, and there isn’t any.  If it don’t change soon, I’m afraid his strength won’t hold out.”

It did not change, and consequently grew worse to bear, the parching and scorching of each day being carried over into the next.  What the newspapers call a heat-wave was drawing to its culmination, which generally reaches the verge of the unbearable, even to the well and strong, just before the “change”—­that lightning change to coolness, and even coldness, which comes while one draws a breath.  How many a life has hung upon the chance of the blessed moment coming in time!

The nurse looked at the thermometer in despair.  Darkness had not taken 10 degrees from yesterday’s temperature of 102 degrees when another blazing sun arose.  The fierce wind had raved and calmed, and raved and calmed, but it had not shifted.  She wetted and she fanned, turn and turn about with Deb, the livelong day, without freshening the dead air that soaked the house and seemed to soak the world.  The fagged and perspiring doctor (a great friend of the patient’s), who came twice daily, came again, too tired to care very much even for this special case.  He looked at it, and shook his head, and begged for a cool drink for the Lord’s sake; and then, having muddled the wits he had tried to stimulate with quarts of whisky-and-soda, went away, saying:  “I can do nothing.  Send for me at once if you see a change.”

At sunset the sick man was very low, his weak heart and his distressed lungs labouring heavily, while the sweat of agony glistened on his forehead and plastered his white hair to his backward-tossed head.  Deb was frantic with fear and grief.  She summoned the doctor again, sending commands to him to summon more doctors—­the best in Melbourne, and any number of them—­in defiance of Mr Thornycroft’s known wishes to the contrary.  At the same time she sent for the clergyman.