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Miranda and Miss Sullivan smiled. Uncle Jake was evidently a little more concerned than he pretended, and chatted to keep up their spirits. Once or twice when the bearers paused to shift hands or rest a moment, their burden seemed to make a futile attempt toward life. There was a tremor of eyelid and lip—perhaps a slight unclosing of the eye. Still, if there was any change, deathliness soon came again.

Miss Sullivan and Miranda ran on to make preparations.

“I think,” said the latter, “that we’d better put him in your room, if you still mean to go, as you decided yesterday.”

“I must go,” replied the other, with a quick intaking of the breath, “unless I can be of some service to this gentleman.” Was it her fine instinct that had recognised the gentleman?

“I don’t see what you can do more than mother and I will—except that you have kinder, pleasanter ways,” Miranda assured her. “P’r’aps this man will turn out to be a sailor ’long shore, after all, and we’ll know how to nuss him better than you would.”