What seemed to him most strange in the working out of this bit of his life's story, was that all that the letter said appeared to be true.

The small island called Cloud Island, where the pestilence was, and to which he had been invited, was not one at which larger ships or schooners could land, so that it was only from the harbour of another island that the seamen got their news.

On all hands it was known that there was bad disease upon Cloud Island, that no doctor was there, and that there was one lady, a Madame Le Maitre, a person of some property, who was devoting herself to nursing the sick.
When Caius asked who she was, and where she came from, one person said one thing and one another.

Some of the men told him that she was old, some of them affirmed that she was young, and this, not because there was supposed to be any mystery concerning her, but because no one seemed to have taken sufficient interest in her existence to obtain accurate information.
When Caius re-entered the gate of his father's farm he had decided to risk the adventure, and obey the letter in all points precisely.
"Would you let it be said that in all these parts there was no one to act the man but a woman ?" he said to his father.
To his mother he described the sufferings that this disease would work, all the details of its pains, and how little children and mothers and wives would be the chief sufferers, dying in helpless pain, or being bereft of those they loved best.
As he talked, the heart of the good woman rose up within her and blessed her son, acknowledging, in spite of her natural desires, that he was in this more truly the great man than she had fancied him in her wildest dreams of opulence and renown.

She credited him with far purer motives than he knew himself to possess.
A father's rule over his own money is a very modified thing, the very fact of true fatherhood making him only a partner with his child.