“Well, Frank, I don’t mind telling you now that I am very glad you sent for me, and I’ll tell you why.  Forty-eight hours more of irritating medicines, and no human skill could have saved your life.”

“Ah! my dear friend, you are my good angel—­you can have no conception how valuable my life is.”

“Oh, yes, I can!”

“And you have saved that life.  Yes!  I am weak still, but I feel I shall live.  You have cured me.”

“In popular language, I have.  But between ourselves nobody ever cures anybody.  Nature cures all that are cured.  But I patted Nature on the back; the others hit her over the head with bludgeons and brick-bats.”

“And now you are going.  I must not keep you or I shall compromise other lives.  Well, go and fulfill your mission.  But first think—­is there anything I can do in part return for such a thing as this, old friend?”

“Only one that I can think of.  Outlive me, old friend.”

A warm and tender grasp of the hand on this, and the Malvern doctor jumped into a fly, and the railway soon whirled him into Worcestershire.

His myrmidon remained behind and carried out his chief’s orders with inflexible severity, unsoftened by blandishments, unshaken by threats.

In concert with Susan he closed the door upon all harassing communications.

One day Evans came to tell the invalid how the prisoners were maltreated.  Susan received him, wormed from him his errand, and told him Mr. Eden was too ill to see him, which was what my French brethren call une sainte mensonge—­I a fib.

A slow but steady cure was effected by these means:  applications of water in various ways to the skin, simple diet, and quiet.  A great appetite soon came; he ate twice as much as he had before the new treatment, and would have eaten twice as much as he did, but the myrmidon would not let him.  Whenever he was feverish the myrmidon packed him, and in half an hour the fever was gone.  His cheeks began to fill, his eyes to clear and brighten, only his limbs could not immediately recover their strength.

As he recovered, his anxiety to be back among his prisoners increased daily, but neither Susan nor the myrmidon would hear of it.  They acted in concert, and stuck at nothing to cure their patient.  They assured him all was going on well in the prison.  They meant well; but for all that, every lie, great or small, is the brink of a precipice the depth of which nothing but Omniscience can fathom.

He believed them, yet he was uneasy; and this uneasiness increased with his returning strength.  At last one morning, happening to awake earlier than usual, he stole a march on his nurses, and taking his stick walked out and tottered into the jail.

He found Josephs dead under the fangs of Hawes, and the whole prison groaning.

Now the very day his symptoms became more favorable it so happened that he had received a few lines from the Home Office that had perhaps aided his recovery by the hopes they inspired.