“Your loving son,
                                                  “C.  F. E.”

Cecil’s letter went off with his brother’s in early morning; but it was such a day as only mails and postmen encounter.  Mountains, pine-woods, nay, even the opposite houses, were blotted out by sheets of driving rain, and it was impossible to think of bringing Jock down!  Dr. Medlicott heard and saw with dismay.  What would the mother say to him-—nay, what ought he to have done?  He could hardly expect her not to reproach him, and he fairly dreaded meeting her eyes when they turned from the streaming window.

But all she said was, “We did not reckon on this.”

“If I had—­” began the doctor.

“Please don’t vex yourself,” said she; “you could not have done otherwise, and perhaps the move would have hurt him more than staying there.  You have been so very kind.  See what you have done here!”

For Armine, after some hours that had been very distressing, had sunk into a calm sleep, and there was a far less oppressed look on his wan little face.

The doctor would have had her take some rest, but she shook her head.  The only means of allaying the gnawing anxiety for Jock, and the despairing fancies about his suffering and Johnny’s helplessness, was the attending constantly to Armine.

“Anyway, I will see him to-day,” said Dr. Medlicott, impelled far more by the patient silence with which she sat, one hand against her beating heart, than he would have been by any entreaty.  But how she thanked him when she found him really setting forth!  She insisted on his taking a guide, as much for his own security as to carry some additional comforts to the prisoners, and she committed to him two little notes, one to each boy, written through a mist of tears.  Yes; tears, unusual as they were with her, were called forth as much by the kindness she met with as by her sick yearning after the two lonely boys.  And when she knew the doctor was on his way, she could yield to Armine’s signs of entreaty, lie back in her chair and sleep, while Reeves watched over him.

When the doctor, by a strong man’s determination, had made his way up the pass, he found matters better than he had dared to expect.  The patient was certainly not worse, and the medicine had kept him in a sleepy, tranquil state, in which he hardly realised the situation.  His young attendant was just considering how to husband the last draught, when the welcome, dripping visitor appeared.  The patient was not in bad spirits considering, and could not but feel himself reprieved by the weather.  He was too sleepy to feel the dulness of his present position, and even allowed that his impromptu nurse had done tolerably well.  Johnny had been ready at every call, had rubbed away an attack of pain, hurt wonderfully little in lifting him, and was “not half a bad lot altogether"—-an admission of which doctor and nurse knew the full worth.