No, it was no dream: there was the stalwart figure pacing to and fro; there was the tent, picturesque and cheerful, with its fire close beside it, and a couple of turbaned Arabs cooking something over the red glow.
"Miss Pendrill, I have been hoping you would come out for a mouthful of fresh air. And how goes your patient?"
"Very, very ill; but always in a stupor. I can leave her for a few minutes sometimes——"
"Ah, good; then we will have supper together out here on the sand; it will eat better to you than in there, and——"
"Oh, but, Mr. Kelly, I am infectious——"
"Stuff and nonsense!—as though I cared for that! We are in the same boat as to that, for I helped to carry her ashore. But we needn't be more doleful than circumstances make us. I am peckish, if you are not. Do let us have supper here together!"
That was the first of many such meals, taken just in those moments when Ursula could leave her patient, and run out into the fresh air. It seemed as though those Arabs must be cooking all day long, for there was always some appetising dish ready; and oh, the blessed relief of those odd minutes spent with one who could give word for word, and whose eyes shone with friendly sympathy and kindly concern! Ursula said in her heart every day as it went by, that but for this she must have died or gone mad.
The Captain had been right in his prognostication. Mrs. Varden sank gradually, and by the end of the week passed away in her sleep; and it was Ursula and Mr. Kelly who bore her to her narrow grave upon those spreading sands; and it was he who filled up the grave that he had dug, and, bringing out a well-worn Prayer-book from his pocket, read over that lonely resting-place those words of hope and promise that have been the consolation of Christian mourners for all time.
Ursula did not take the fell disease. She was unnerved and unstrung for a time; but the quiet days went by one by one, and the consciousness of that watchful presence without kept her from any of those fears and tremors which must otherwise have made this period of waiting an agony to her.