“Pardon me, Miss Marston; you overrate the danger. Depend upon it, your respected parent will be quite a different man in a week, though it may be a month or more before he is fully recovered. You don’t know what a constitution he has.”

“You have given me fresh hope,” she said. “I feel quite cheered up—that is” (and she sighed) “if I could be cheerful again about anything.”

Here she walked into the cave and sat down by father to watch till he awoke, and we all went out about our daily work, whatever it was—nothing very wonderful, I daresay, but it kept us from thinking.

Starlight was right. As luck would have it, father woke up a deal better than when he laid down. The fever had gone away, his head was right again, and he began to ask for something to eat—leastways to drink, first. But Aileen wouldn’t give him any of that, and very little to eat. Starlight had told her what to do in case he wanted what wasn’t good for him, and as she was pretty middling obstinate, like himself, she took her own ways.

After this he began to get right; it wasn’t easy to kill old dad. He seemed to be put together with wire and whipcord; not made of flesh and blood like other men. I don’t wonder old England’s done so much and gone so far with her soldiers and sailors if they was bred like him. It’s my notion it they was caught young, kept well under command, and led by men they respected, a regiment or a man-of-war’s crew like him would knock smoke out of any other thousand men the world could put up. More’s the pity there ain’t some better way of keeping ‘em straight than there is.

He was weak for a bit—very weak; he’d lost a deal of blood; and, try how he would, he couldn’t stand up long at a time, and had to give in and lie down in spite of himself. It fretted him a deal, of course; he’d never been on his back before, and he couldn’t put up with it. Then his temper began to show again, and Aileen had a deal to bear and put up with.