ak, when there was nothing
more for her to bear or do, and Mary took charge of her, to see her to
bed, Mrs. Grant and the doctors taking Oscar into their keeping. Well,
there was no use in mincing matters--the boy's face was much beaten and
battered by the fall; it would show the scars for some time to
come--perhaps for ever: concussion of the brain, a fractured leg; even
Mrs. Grant's heart grew sick, hearing the doctors enumerate the evils
that had befallen him.

"Yes, he'll live--at least, I don't see why he shouldn't," said his
uncle. "Yes, God willing, he'll live;" but he went out to his patients
the next morning with an anxious brow.

A terrible awakening came to Oscar, after that long death-like
stillness; weary days of restless insensibility and pain followed. Poor
suffering boy, it was hard to hear him moan and rave over the fancied
peril of the girls.

"Inna, Inna!" he would cry. "I believe she cared for me more than
anybody else in the world, and now I'm leaving her to die. I would save
her if I could," and he would try to spring out of his bed--only try,
poor maimed lad; but these fits of restless insensibility wasted his
strength sadly.

In vain Mrs. Grant tried to soothe him; sometimes his uncle sent to the
Owl's Nest for Inna, exiled there against her will, because being in the
house, hearing his moans and wild cries, made her pale and ill,
following close upon the strain to her childish nerves before.

The doctor's heart misgave him terribly at this time. Would his dear
dead brother's son die--slip, as it were, away from him, his father's
brother, who had taken the friendless lad to his heart, in the place of
the younger brother he had well-nigh idolised? Only in his quiet,
reserved, absent-minded way he had never thought how much he cared for
him. He sent for his small niece--the child who had stolen into all
their hearts with her gentle, unobtrusive love, and would stand aside
from the bed when she came with a heavy sigh, while she spoke the boy's
name. She had more power to soothe him than he; she laid her small cool
hand on Oscar's feverish one, holding it till he seemed to understand
who it was near him. Then he would sink into long, unrefreshing, heavy
slumber, to awake to all the wild frenzy again. Thus, to and fro went
the little maiden from the farm to the Owl's Nest and Madame Giche, who
chatted to and tried to amuse her when there, and to beguile her from
her childish anxiety.

"Yes, de