In the last half of each night Zura and I watched by Page and wrestled with the cruel thing that held him captive.  They were painful, but revealing hours.  I was very close to the great secrets of life, and the eternal miracle of coming dawn was only matched in tender beauty by the wonder of a woman’s love.  It was Zura’s cool, soft hand that held the burning lids and shut out the hideous specters Page’s fevered eyes saw closing down upon him.  It was her voice that soothed him into slumber after the frenzy of delirium.

“Ah,” he’d pant, weary of the struggle with a fancied foe, “you’ve come, my lovely princess.  No!  You’re my goddess!” Then with tones piteous and beseeching he would begin anew the prayer ever present on his lips since his illness.  “Beloved goddess, tell me—­what did I do with them?  You are divine; you know.  Help me to find them quick.  Quick; they are shutting the door; it has bars.  I cannot see your face.”

“I am here, Page,” Zura would answer.  “If the door shuts, I’ll be right by your side.”

In love for the boy each member of the house was ready day or night for instant service, but vain were our combined efforts to help the fevered brain to lay hold of definite thought long enough for him to name the thing that was breaking his heart.  From pleading for time to search for something, he would wander into scenes of his boyhood.  Once he appealed to me as his mother and asked me to sing him to sleep.  Before I could steady my lips he had drifted into talk of the sea and tried to sing a sailor’s song.  Often he fancied himself on a pirate ship and begged not to be put off on some lonely island.  He fiercely resisted.  But his feebleness was no match for Zura’s young strength, and as she held him she would begin to sing: 

    “Before I slept I thought of thee;
    Then fell asleep and sought for thee
        And found thee: 
    Had I but known ’twas only seeming,
    I had not waked, but lay forever dreaming.”

“Dreaming, dreaming,” the boy would repeat.  “Sweetheart, you are my dearest dream.”

Inch by inch we fought and held at bay the enemy.  We lost all contact with the outside.  To us the center of the world was the pink-and-white room, and on the stricken boy that lay on the bed was staked all our hope.

The long delayed crisis flashed upon us early one morning when the doctors found in what we had feared was the end only a healing sleep from which Page awakened and called Zura by name.  Even then it was a toss-up whether he could win out against despair.  Uppermost in his mind was ever the torturing thought of the thing that had made him a fugitive.

An icy hand was laid upon our joy at the signs of returning health when we remembered a certain ship that was right then cutting the blue waters of the Pacific nearing the shores of Japan, bearing authority to make a prisoner of Page if he lived.  They were not happy days, and it was with undefined emotions that I saw life and strength come slowly to the sick man.