ld still be alive. He had never approved of
her taking him on the water; had remonstrated with her in the beginning,
but had been overruled by her impetuous confidence in her own strength
and skill. Now, as often as he saw the poor little fellow's woe-begone
face, he had a strange mixture of pity and hatred towards him. In vain
he reasoned against it. "He has lost his best friend, as well as I," he
said to himself; "I ought to try to comfort him." But it was impossible:
the child's presence grew more and more irksome to him, until, at last,
he said to Sally, one day:

"Sally, you and Raby are both looking very ill. I want you to go away
for a time. How would you like to go to 'The Runs,' for a month?"

"Oh, not there, dear doctor! please do not send us there!" cried Sally.
"Indeed I could not bear it. We might go to father's for a while. That
would be change enough; and Raby would have children to play with there,
in the village, all the time, and that would be the best thing for him."

So Jim and Sally went to Deacon Little's to stay for a time. Mrs. Little
welcomed them with a cordiality which it would have done Hetty's heart
good to see. Her old aversion to Sally had been so thoroughly conquered
that she was more than half persuaded in her own mind it had never
existed. When the doctor was left alone in the house, he found it easier
to bear the burden of his grief. It is only after the first shock of
a great sorrow is past that we are helped by faces and voices and the
clasping of hands. At the first, there is but one help, but one healing;
and that is solitude.

Dr. Eben came out from this grief an altered man. Poor Hetty! How little
she had understood her value to her husband! Could she have seen him
walking slowly from house to house, his eyes fixed on the ground, his
head bent forward; all his old elasticity of tread gone; his ready
smile gone; the light, glad look of his eyes gone,--how would she have
repented her rash and cruel deed! how would the scales have fallen from
her eyes, revealing to her the monstrous misapprehension to which she
had sacrificed her life and his! Even long after people had ceased to
talk about Hetty's death, or to remember it unless they saw the doctor,
the first sight of his tall bowed figure recalled it all; and again
and again, as he passed men on the street, they turned and said to each
other, with a sad shake of the head:

"He's never got over it."

"No, nor ever will."

O