resolutely,
though every fiber of her heart throbbed with keen agony as she told to
Irving Stanley the story of her life. She was a wife, a mother, the
sister of Hugh Worthington, they said, the Adah for whom Dr. Richards
had sought so long in vain, and for whom Murdock, the wicked father, was
seeking still for aught she knew to the contrary. Even the story of the
doctor's secretion in the barn at Sunnymead was confessed. Nothing was
withheld except the fact that even as he professed to love her, so she
in turn loved him, or had done so before she knew it was a sin. Surprise
had, for a few moments, stifled every other emotion, and Irving Stanley
had sat like one suddenly bereft of motion, when he read who Maria
Gordon was. Then came the bitter thought that he had lost her, mingled
with a deep feeling of resentment toward the man who had so cruelly
wronged the gentle girl, and who alone stood between him and happiness.
For Irving Stanley could overlook all the rest. His great warm heart,
so full of kindly sympathy and generous charity for all mankind could
take to its embrace the fair, sweet woman he had learned to love so
much, and be a father to her little boy, as if it had been his own. But
this might not be. There was a mighty obstacle in the way, and feeling
that it mattered little now whether he ever came from the field alive,
Irving Stanley, with a whispered prayer for strength to bear and do
right, had hidden the letter in his bosom, and then, when the hour of
conflict came, plunged into the thickest of the fight with a
fearlessness born of keen and recent disappointment, which made life
less valuable than it had been before.

It is not strange, then, that he should start and stagger backward when
he came so suddenly upon the doctor, or that the first impulse of weak
human nature was to leave the fallen man, but the second, the Christian
impulse, bade him stay, and forgetting his own slight but painful wound,
he bent over Adah's husband, and did what he could to alleviate the
anguish he saw was so hard to bear. At the sound of his voice, a spasm
of pain passed over the doctor's pallid face, and the flash of a sudden
fire gleamed for a moment in his eye, as he, too, remembered Adah, and
thought of what might be when the grass was growing over his untimely
grave.

The doctor knew that he was dying, and yet his first question was:

"Do you think I can live? Did any one ever recover with such a wound as
this?"