It was a fortnight before I was well enough to get out of bed and lie comfortably on the sofa.  All that time Jack and Elsie tended me with unsparing devotion.  Elsie had a little bed made up in my room; and Jack came to see me two or three times a day, and sat for whole hours with me.  It was so nice he was a doctor!  A doctor, you know, isn’t a man—­in some ways.  And it soothed me so to have him sitting there with Elsie by my bedside.

They were “Jack” and “Elsie” to me, to their faces, before three days were out; and I was plain “Una” to them:  it sounded so sweet and sisterly.  Elsie slipped it out the second morning as naturally as could be.

“Una’d like a cup of tea, Jack;” then as red as fire all at once, she corrected herself, and added, “I mean, Miss Callingham.”

“Oh, do call me Una!” I cried; “it’s so much nicer and more natural....  But how did you come to know my name was Una at all?” For she slipped it out as glibly as if she’d always called me so.

“Why, everybody knows that.”  Elsie answered, amused.  “The whole world speaks of you always as Una Callingham.  You forget you’re a celebrity.  Doctors have read memoirs about you at Medical Congresses.  You’ve been discussed in every paper in Europe and America.”

I paused and sighed.  This was very humiliating.  It was unpleasant to rank in the public mind somewhere between Constance Kent and Laura Bridgman.  But I had to put up with it.

“Very well,” I said, with a deep breath, “if those I don’t care for call me so behind my back, let me at least have the pleasure of hearing myself called so by those I love, like you, Elsie.”

She leant over me and kissed my forehead with a burst of genuine delight.

“Then you love me, Una!” she exclaimed.

“How can I help it?” I answered.  “I love you dearly already.”  And I might have added with truth, “And your brother also.”

For Jack was really, without any exception, the most lovable man I ever met in my life—­at once so strong and manly, and yet so womanly and so gentle.  Every day I stopped there, I liked him better and better.  I was glad when he came into my room, and sorry when he went away again to work on the farm:  for he worked very hard; his hand was all horny with common agricultural labour.  It was sad to think of such a man having to do such work.  And yet he was so clever, and such a capital doctor.  I wondered he hadn’t done well and stayed in England.  But Elsie told me he’d had great disappointments, and failed in his profession through no fault of his own.  I could never understand that:  he had such a delightful manner.  Though, perhaps I was prejudiced; for, in point of fact, I began to feel I was really in love with Jack Cheriton.