his face as he slept. It was a
curious study to her, a young man--_this_ young man, asleep. His brown
lashes lay on his cheek; his facial lines were as placid as a child's.
As she looked she gained courage to go over softly and peer down on him.
How boyish he seemed! How little to be feared! How innocent, after all!

As she studied him she thought of him the day before, with closed eyes,
a ghastly stream of blood flowing down and soaking her dress. She
shuddered. His hands, clean and strong and white, lay out on the
coverlet, loose and open, the fingers fallen into graceful lines.
Abruptly, a boy outside gave a shout, and she leaped away with a sudden
spring that left her pale and breathless. As she paused in the door and
looked back at the undisturbed sleeper, she smiled, and the pink came
back into her thin face.

Albert's superb young blood began to assert itself, and on the afternoon
of the second day he was able to sit in his rocking chair before the
fire and read a little, though he professed that his eyes were not
strong, in order that Maud should read for him. This she did as often as
she could leave her other work, which was "not half often enough," the
invalid grumbled.

"More than you deserve," she found courage to say.

Hartley let nothing interfere with the book business, and the popular
sympathy for Albert he coined into dollars remorselessly.

"You take it easy," he kept saying to his partner; "don't you
worry--your pay goes on just the same. You're doing well right where you
are. By jinks! biggest piece o' luck," he went on, half in earnest.
"Why, I can't turn around without taking an order--fact! Turned in a
book on the livery bill--that's all right. We'll make a clear hundred
dollars out o' that little bump o' yours."

"Little bump! Say, now, that's----"

"Keep it up--put it on! Don't get up in a hurry. I don't need you to
canvass, and I guess you enjoy this 'bout as well." He ended with a sly
wink and cough.

Yes; the convalescence was delicious; afterward it grew to be one of the
sweetest weeks of his life. Maud reading to him, bringing his food, and
singing for him---- yes; all that marred it was the stream of people who
came to inquire how he was getting along. The sympathy was largely
genuine, as Hartley could attest, but it bored the invalid. He had
rather be left in quiet with Walter Scott and Maud, the drone of the
long descriptive passages being a sure soporific.

He did not say, a