It was Sally who opposed the doctor’s wish to send her to a hospital.

“If it’s only a question of getting back her health, she’d better die,” she declared.  “We’ve got but one chance with her, Dr. Giddings, to keep her here.  When she finds out she’s been to a hospital, that will be the end of it with her kind.  We’ll never get hold of her again.  I’ll take care of Mrs. McQuillen.”

Doctor Giddings was impressed by this wisdom.

“You think you have a chance, Miss Grower?” he asked.  He had had a hospital experience.

Miss Grower was wont to express optimism in deeds rather than words.

“If I didn’t think so, I’d ask you to put a little more in your hypodermic next time,” she replied.

And the doctor went away, wondering . . . .

Drink!  Convalescence brought little release for the watchers.  The fiends would retire, pretending to have abandoned the field, only to swoop down again when least expected.  There were periods of calm when it seemed as though a new and bewildered personality were emerging, amazed to find in life a kindly thing, gazing at the world as one new-born.  And again, Mrs. McQuillen or Ella Finley might be seen running bareheaded across the street for Miss Grower.  Physical force was needed, as the rector discovered on one occasion; physical force, and something more, a dauntlessness that kept Sally Grower in the room after the other women had fled in terror.  Then remorse, despondency, another fear . . . .

As the weeks went by, the relapses certainly became fewer.  Something was at work, as real in its effects as the sunlight, but invisible.  Hodder felt it, and watched in suspense while it fought the beasts in this woman, rending her frame in anguish.  The frame might succumb, the breath might leave it to moulder, but the struggle, he knew, would go until the beasts were conquered.  Whence this knowledge?—­for it was knowledge.

On the quieter days of her convalescence she seemed, indeed, more Madonna than Magdalen as she sat against the pillows, her red-gold hair lying in two heavy plaits across her shoulders, her cheeks pale; the inner, consuming fires that smouldered in her eyes died down.  At such times her newly awakened innocence (if it might be called such—­pathetic innocence, in truth!) struck awe into Hodder; her wonder was matched by his own.  Could there be another meaning in life than the pursuit of pleasure, than the weary effort to keep the body alive?

Such was her query, unformulated.  What animated these persons who had struggled over her so desperately, Sally Grower, Mr. Bentley, and Hodder himself?  Thus her opening mind.  For she had a mind.

Mr. Bentley was the chief topic, and little by little he became exalted into a mystery of which she sought the explanation.

“I never knew anybody like him,” she would exclaim.