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 flickering of breath, the half-unconscious torture of a human frame.

For days together she never left the sepulchre.

She waited on his lassitude, his heats, his chills, his shuddering pains, all the long hours through, doing what she could do to alleviate his ills; and at night, when she lit the little bronze lamp with oil, she was alone with a man delirious, and who seemed to her on the point of death.

She never felt that temptation, which a coward would have felt, to leave him to his fate and rush away from this misery and danger into safety where the dwelling of men and the meeting of roofs would give it. She prayed passionately for him. That was all she did. She never had heard of physicians; there was not one at Santa Tarsilla. If such a person were needed he had to be sought from Orbetello, and no one dreamt of doing that once in ten years, though the surgeon of the Orbetellano was considered the parish doctor of the whole district. There was hardly any one in the villages in summer, and the few that were there, in winter, cured themselves with nostrums or with simples, and, if they could