About a month after the battle of Naseby, and while yet the king was going and coming as regards Raglan, the wounded Rowland, long before he was fit to be moved from the farm-house where his servant had found him shelter, was brought home to the castle.  Shafto, faithful as hare-brained, had come upon him almost accidentally, after long search, and just in time to save his life.  Mistress Watson received him with tears, and had him carried to the same turret-chamber whence Richard had escaped, in order that she might be nigh him.  The poor fellow was but a shadow of his former self, and looked more likely to vanish than to die in the ordinary way.  Hence he required constant attention—­which was so far from lacking that the danger, both physical and spiritual, seemed rather to lie in over-service.  Hitherto, of the family, it had been the marquis chiefly that spoiled him; but now that he was so sorely wounded for the king, and lay at death’s door, all the ladies of the castle were admiring, pitiful, tender, ministrant, paying him such attentions as nobody could be trusted to bear uninjured except a doll or a baby.  One might have been tempted to say that they sought his physical welfare at the risk of his moral ruin.  But there is that in sickness which leads men back to a kind of babyhood, and while it lasts there is comparatively little danger.  It is with returning health that the peril comes.  Then self and self-fancied worth awake, and find themselves again, and the risk is then great indeed that all the ministrations of love be taken for homage at the altar of importance.  How often has not a mistress found that after nursing a servant through an illness, perhaps an old servant even, she has had to part with her for unendurable arrogance and insubordination?  But present sickness is a wonderful antidote to vanity, and nourisher of the gentle primeval simplicities of human nature.  So long as a man feels himself a poor creature, not only physically unable, but without the spirit to desire to act, kindness will move gratitude, and not vanity.  In Rowland’s case happily it lasted until something better was able to get up its head a little.  But no one can predict what the first result of suffering will be, not knowing what seeds lie nearest the surface.  Rowland’s self-satisfaction had been a hard pan beneath which lay thousands of germinal possibilities invaluable; and now the result of its tearing up remained to be seen.  If in such case Truth’s never-ceasing pull at the heart begins to be felt, allowed, considered; if conscience begin, like a thing weary with very sleep, to rouse itself in motions of pain from the stiffness of its repose, then is there hope of the best.