ep him with
us, he will stay."

So, with tear-wet faces, grateful yet still anxious, the two women
left him for the night and sought hospitality at a modest _pension_ in
the neighborhood of the hospital.

But a precious life still hung in the balance. As he had lain for many
days, so the young soldier continued to lie, for many days to come,
apparently without thought or vitality, save that those who watched
him could catch now and then a low murmur from his lips, and could see
the faint rise and fall of his scarred and bandaged breast.

Then, so slowly that it seemed to those who looked lovingly on that
ages were going by, he began definitely to mend. He could open his
eyes, and move his head and hands, and he seemed to grasp, by degrees,
the fact that his mother and his Aunt Millicent were often sitting at
his bedside. But when he tried to speak his tongue would not obey his
will.

One day, when he awakened from a refreshing sleep, he seemed brighter
and stronger than he had been at any time before. The two women whom
he most loved were sitting on opposite sides of his cot, and his
devoted and delighted nurse stood near by, smiling down on him. He
smiled back up at each of them in turn, but he made no attempt to
speak. He seemed to know that he had not yet the power of
articulation.

His cot, in an alcove at the end of the main aisle, was so placed
that, when the curtains were drawn aside, he could, at will, look
down the long rows of beds where once the looms had clattered, and
watch wan faces, and recumbent forms under the white spreads, and
nurses, some garbed in white, and some in blue, and some in more sober
colors, moving gently about among the sufferers in performance of
their thrice-blest and most angelic tasks. It was there that he was
looking now, and the two women at his bedside who were watching him,
saw that his eyes were fixed, with strange intensity, on some object
in the distance. They turned to see what it was. To their utter
astonishment and dismay they discovered, marching up the aisle,
accompanied by an _infirmiere_, Colonel Richard Butler. Whence, when,
and how he had come, they knew not. He stopped at the entrance to the
alcove, and held up his hand as though demanding silence. And there
was silence. No one spoke or stirred. He looked down at Pen who lay,
still speechless, staring up at him in surprise and delight.

Into the colonel's glowing face there came a look of tenderness, of
rapt