On no less an authority than that of the great doctor who came again from Chicago for a second consultation with Doctor Farnham, Andrew Galbraith owed his life during the two days following his return to consciousness to the unremitting care and devotion of one person.

Seconding the efforts of the physicians, and skilfully directing those of the nurses, Margery threw herself into the vicarious struggle with the generous self-sacrifice which counts neither cost nor loss; and on the third day she had her reward. Her involuntary guest and charge was distinctly better, and again, so the two doctors declared, the balance was inclining slightly toward recovery.

It was in the afternoon of this third day, when she had been reading to him, at his own request, the sayings of the Man on the Mount, that he referred for the first time to the details of the accident which had so nearly blotted him out. Upon his asking, she related the few and simple facts of the rescue, modestly minimizing her own part in it, and giving her companion in the catboat full credit.

"The writer-man," he said thoughtfully, when she had finished telling him how Griswold had worked over him in the boat, and how he would not give up. "I remember; you fetched him out to the hotel with you one day: no, you needna fear I'll be forgetting him." Then, with a shrewd look out of the steel-gray eyes: "How long have you been knowing him, Maggie, child?"

"Oh, for quite a long time," she hastened to say. "He came here, sick and helpless, one day last spring, and—well, there isn't any hospital here in Wahaska, you know, so we took him in and helped him get over the fever, or whatever it was. This was his room while he stayed with us."

Andrew Galbraith wagged his head on the pillow.

"I know," he said. "And ye're doing it again for a poor auld man whose siller has never bought him anything like the love you're spending on him. You're everybody's good angel, I'm thinking, Maggie, lassie." Though he did not realize it, his sickness was bringing him day by day nearer to his far-away boyhood in the Inverness-shire hills, and it was easy to slip into the speech of the mother-tongue. Then, after a long pause, he went on: "He wasna wearing a beard, a red beard trimmed down to a spike—this writer-man, when ye found him, was he?"

She shook her head. "No; I have never seen him with a beard."

The sick man turned his face to the wall, and after a time she heard him repeating softly the words which she had just read to him. "But if ye forgive not men ... neither will your Father forgive...." And again, "Judge not that ye be not judged." When he turned back to her there were new lines of suffering in the gray old face.

"I'm sore beset, child; sore beset," he sighed. "You were telling me that MacFarland and Johnson will be here to-night?"

"Yes; they should both reach Wahaska this evening."

Another pause, and at the end of it: "That man Broffin: you'll remember you asked me one day who he was, and I tell 't ye he was a special officer for the bank. Is he still here?"

"He is; I saw him on the street this morning."

Again Andrew Galbraith turned his face away, and he was quiet for so long a time that she thought he had fallen asleep. But he had not.

"You're thinking something of the writer-man, lassie? Don't mind the clavers of an auld man who never had a chick or child of his ain."

Her answer was such as a child might have made. She lifted the big-jointed hand on the coverlet and pressed it softly to her flushed cheek, and he understood.

"I thought so; I was afraid so," he said, slowly. "You say you have known him a long time: it canna have been long enough, bairnie."

"But it is," she insisted, loyally. "I know him better than he knows himself; oh, very much better."

"Ye know the good in him, maybe; there's good in all men, I'm thinking now, though there was a time when I didna believe it."

"I know the good and the bad—and the bad is only the good turned upside down."

Again the sick man wagged his head on the pillow and closed his eyes.

"Ye're a loving lassie, Maggie, and that's a' there is to it," he commented; and after another interval: "What must be, must be. We spoke of this man Broffin: I must see him before Johnson comes. Can ye get him for me, Maggie, child?"

She nodded and went down-stairs to the telephone, returning almost immediately.

"I was fortunate enough to catch him at the hotel. He will be here in a few minutes," was the word she brought; and Galbraith thanked her with his eyes.

"When he comes, ye'll let me see him alone—just for a few minutes," he begged; and beyond that he said no more.

It was after the click of the gate latch had announced Broffin's arrival that Margery drew the shades to shut out the glare of the afternoon sun, lowering the one at the bed's head so that the light no longer fell upon the instruments of the small house-telephone-set mounted upon the wall beside the door.

"Mr. Broffin is here, and I'll send him up," she said. "But you mustn't let him stay long, and you mustn't try to talk too much."

The sick man promised, and as she was going away she turned to repeat the caution. Andrew Galbraith's eyes were closed in weariness, and he did not see that she was standing with her back to the wall while she admonished him, or that, when she had gone to send the visitor up, the ear-piece of the house-telephone-set had been detached from its hook and left dangling by its wire cord.

Miss Grierson went on into the library after she had met the detective at the door and had told him how to find the up stairs room. When the sound of a cautiously closed door told her that Broffin had entered the sick-room, she snatched the receiver of the library house 'phone from its hook and held it to her ear. For a little time keen anxiety wrote its sign manual in the knitted brows and the tightly pressed lips. Then she smiled and the dark eyes grew softly radiant. "The dear old saint!" she whispered; "the dear, dear old saint!" And when Broffin came down a few minutes later, she went to open the hall door for him, serenely demure and with honey on her tongue, as befitted the rÔle of "everybody's good angel."

"Did you find him worse than you feared, or better than you hoped?" she asked.

"He's mighty near the edge, I should say—what? But you never can tell. Some of these old fellows can claw back to the top o' the hill after all the doctors in creation have thrown up their hands. I've seen it. What does Doc Farnham say?"

"What he always says; 'while there's life, there's hope.'"

Broffin nodded and went his way down the walk, stopping at the gate to take up the cigar he had hidden on his arrival.

"So Galbraith's out of it, lock, stock and barrel," he muttered, as he strode thoughtfully townward. "I reckoned it'd be that-a-way, as soon as I heard the story o' that shipwreck. And now I ain't so blamed sure that it's Raymer a-holdin' the fort in them pretty black eyes. The old man talked like a man that had just been honeyfugled and talked over and primed plum' up to the muzzle. Why the blue blazes can't she take her iron-moulder fellow and be satisfied? She can't swing to both of 'em. Ump!—the old man wanted me to skip out on a wild-goose chase to 'Frisco in that bond business, and take the first train! Sure, I'll go—but not to-day; oh, no, by grapples; not this day!"

It was possibly an hour beyond Broffin's visit when Margery, having successfully read the sick man to sleep, tiptoed out of the room and went below stairs to shut herself into the hall telephone closet. The number she asked for was that of the Raymer Foundry and Machine Works, and Raymer, himself, answered the call.

"Are you awfully busy?" she asked.

"Up to my chin—yes. But that doesn't count if I can do anything for you."

"Have you heard anything yet from Mr.—from our friend?"

"Not a word. But I'm not worrying any more now."

"Why aren't you?"

"Because I've been remembering that he is the happy—or unhappy—possessor of the 'artistic temperament' and that accounts for anything and everything. I'd forgotten that for a few minutes, you know."

"Well?" she said, with the faintest possible accent of impatience.

"He has gone off somewhere to plug away on that book of his; I'm sure of it. And he hasn't gone very far. I'm inclined to believe that Mrs. Holcomb knows where he is—only she won't tell. And somebody else knows, too."

"Who is the somebody else?"

Though the wire was in a measure public, Raymer risked a single word.

"Charlotte."

None of the sudden passion that leaped into Margery Grierson's eyes was suffered to find its way into her voice when she said: "What makes you think that?"

"Oh, a lot of little things. I was over at the house last night, and there is some sort of a tea-pot tempest going on; I couldn't make out just what. But from the way things shaped up, I gathered that our friend was wanted in Lake Boulevard, and wanted bad—for some reason or other. I had to promise that I'd try to dig him up, before I got away."

"Well?" went the questioning word over the wires, and this time the impatient accent was unconcealed.

"I promised; but this morning Doctor Bertie called me up to say that it was all right; that I needn't trouble myself."

"And I needn't have troubled you," said the voice at the Mereside transmitter. "Excuse me, as Hank Billingsly used to say when he happened to shoot the wrong man. Come over when you feel like it—and have time. You mustn't forget that you owe me two calls. Good-by."

After Margery Grierson had let herself out of the stifling little closet under the hall stair, she went into the darkened library and sat for a long time staring at the cold hearth. It was a crooked world, and just now it was a sharply cruel one. There was much to be read between the lines of the short telephone talk with Edward Raymer. The trap was sprung and its jaws were closing; and in his extremity Kenneth Griswold was turning, not to the woman who had condoned and shielded and paid the costly price, but to the other.

"Dear God!" she said softly, when the prolonged stare had brought the quick-springing tears to her eyes; "and I—I could have kept him safe!"