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bruising and knocking about. He’s more than half starved too, I should think, poor little wretch!”

“Oh, the poor child! What have you done with him?”

“Why, I brought him here. He’s in the little guestroom now. Dr. Wakeham came, and Fanning. They got a nurse at once and she’s fixed him. It’ll be a good long job, Kitten, but I thought———”

“I should think not, Winthrop!” Alison was halfway upstairs by this time, pulling off her gloves as she went. “Oh, poor baby! Suppose you had killed him! Did you find out where he belongs?” she paused to ask.

“He hasn’t come to himself enough to be questioned yet. There was a letter in his pocket addressed to St. Croix at some place in New Zealand—that was all. He’s got a waif-and-stray look about him, somehow.”

Alison disappeared round the bend. The Professor retired to his library, smiling, and Alison opened the door of the little room, shadowy now in the late afternoon, nodded to the tall nurse in the background, and sat down by the bedside.

The severe grey eyes looked at her unwinking. She was no more strange than all the other strange things that had been happening, but he felt he could speak to her. The nurse, he had realised, though invested with authority which had sponged him, brushed his hair, and insisted on the swallowing of something in a cup which he did not want, yet was not a person who should be questioned as to the immediate past and future. Besides, his head had been aching too confoundedly and his tongue wouldn’t work properly. But this lady with the furs and soft cheeks and the violets in her little hat or whatever it was, she evidently belonged; he would speak to her. (I hope to God my voice isn’t going to shake.)