The Pathan drew himself together and stood at attention. "_Huzoor!_" he answered quietly. "It is done; the fire blazes."
Belle in the half-shadows thrown by the sheltered lamp stood up looking kindly at the new-comer. "I'm glad you have come, Afzul," she whispered; "he has been calling for you so often."
Behind his military salute the man smiled approvingly. She was of the right sort, faithful to the old love. Marsden _sahib_ should marry her and get the money, if that was the way they managed things over the black water. And this solution of the question grew upon him as he watched her unfailing devotion when, between them, they helped the sick man through the dreary trouble which was all too familiar to the Pathan. "It was so in the cave," he would say, as time dragged on through days when the sick man lay still and silent, through nights when the quick hurried words never seemed to leave his lips and it was all they could do to keep on the bandages.
"It's the bullet in the shoulder blade that's troublin' him," said the clever little Irish doctor, who rode forty miles every day between two trains in order to see his patient and keep an eye on his hospital. "Put three more days' strength into him, Mrs. Raby, and I'll bring over another man and we'll have at it somehow. The wound has niver haled, and niver will till it gets a fair chance."
Shortly after this Belle found herself pacing up and down the verandah, scarcely daring to think of what was going on within. Would he die? Was this really the end? Was it to be peace at last, and no more struggle? And lo and behold! when the doctors let her into the room again he was lying with a smile on his face, because the pain, the ceaseless pain which had annihilated everything else in the world, was gone.
"I've given you a lot of trouble," he said; and even as he spoke fell asleep from sheer, blessed ease.
After that again came a time when even Afzul stood aside and let the _mem_ take the lead while he sat watching her curiously--a time when it positively seemed more to her that Philip should take so many spoonfuls of nourishment every hour than that he should get better; when the content of immediate success blotted out the thought of future failure, and the fear of death was forgotten in the desire of staving it off. Most people who have nursed a case in which even the doctors stay their hands and wait on Nature, know that strange dream-like life wherein the peaks and passes on the temperature chart seem by contraries to raise or depress the whole world. Belle fought the fight bravely; and not until she stood one day looking at a thermometer which registered normal did she feel a sinking at her heart. They had come down into the low levels of life; they were back in the work-day world. Yet it was not the one they had left six weeks before. Even outwardly it had changed. The last green blade of grass had withered to a brown shadow on the sunbaked soil, and the dust-storms of May swept over the half-finished house.