with violence. "_Of course!_ Fool! Fool that I am! Merciful God in
Heaven--_it's her boy_--and _I_ have saved him! _Her boy!_ And I've
been cudgelling my failing addled brains for months, wondering where
I had seen his face before. He's my godson, Sister, and I haven't set
eyes on him for the last--nearly twenty years!"

Miss Norah O'Neill had never before seen an excited doctor in a
hospital ward, but she now beheld one nearly beside himself with
excitement, joy, surprise, and incredulity. (It is sad to have to
relate that she also heard one murmuring over and over again to
himself, "Well, I am damned".)

At last Colonel John Decies announced that the world was a tiny, small
place and a very rum one, that it was just like _The Hawk_ to be the
means of saving _her_ boy of all people, and then took the patient's
hand in his, and sat studying his face, in wondering, pondering
silence.

To Miss Norah O'Neill this seemed extraordinarily powerful affection
for a mere _godson_, and one lost to sight for twenty years at that.
Yet Colonel Decies was a bachelor and, no, the patient certainly
resembled him in no way whatsoever. The tiny new-born germ of a
romance died at once in Miss O'Neill's romantic heart--and yet, had
she but known, here was a romance such as her soul loved above all
things--the son of the adored dead mistress discovered _in extremis_,
and saved, by the devout platonic lover, the life-long lover, and
revealed to him by the utterance of the pre-natally learnt words of
the dead woman herself!

Yes--how many times through those awful days had Decies heard that