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.

He had lost much blood, having lain a long time, as I say, in the fallow-field before Shafto found him.  Oft-recurring fever, extreme depression, and intermittent and doubtful progress life-wards followed.  Through all the commotion of the king’s visits, the coming and going, the clang of hoofs and clanking of armour, the heaving of hearts and clamour of tongues, he lay lapped in ignorance and ministration, hidden from the world and deaf to the gnarring of its wheels, prisoned in a twilight dungeon, to which Richard’s sword had been the key.  The world went grinding on and on, much the same, without him whom it had forgotten; but the over-world remembered him, and now and then looked in at a window:  all dungeons have one window which no gaoler and no tyrant can build up.

The marquis went often to see him, full of pity for the gay youth thus brought low; but he would lie pale and listless, now and then turning his eyes, worn large with the wasting of his face, upon him, but looking as if he only half heard him.  His master grew sad about him.  The next time his majesty came, he asked him if he remembered the youth, telling him how he had lain wounded ever since the battle at Naseby.  The king remembered him well enough, but had never missed him.  The marquis then told him how anxious he was about him, for that nothing woke him from the weary heartlessness into which he had fallen.