iven you up! Though I knew all the time we shouldn't. I
could not believe--"

"Must come to that Lizzie,--do it over again; for what you have here
isn't your old Dan."

"My old Dan!" she exclaimed, and then there was a little break in the
conversation the two heroes were endeavoring to maintain.

Meanwhile the surgeon had seated himself on the edge of the bed waiting
the moment when there should be a positive need of him. He saw when it
arrived.

"Colonel," said he, in his hearty, cheery voice, which alone had lifted
many a poor fellow from the slough of misery, and put new heart and soul
in him, since his ministrations began in the hospital,--"Colonel, your
aids are in waiting."

The soldier smiled; his face flushed. "My aids can wait," said he.

"That is a fine thing to say. Here he has been bothering me, madam, not
to say browbeating me, and I've been moving heaven and earth for my
part, and at last have secured the aids, and now hear him dismiss them!"

"Bring them round here," said the patient suddenly.

The surgeon quietly lifted from the floor a pair of crutches, and placed
them in his patient's hands.

"How many years must I rely on my aids?" he asked quietly.

"Perhaps three months. By that time you will be as good as ever."

A change passed over the young man's face at this. Whatever the emotion
so expressed, it had otherwise no demonstration. He turned now abruptly
toward his sister, and said: "They can wait. I've got another kind of
aid now. Come, Lizzie, say something."

A sudden radiance flashed across his face when he ceased to speak, and
waited for that voice.

"I shall be round again in an hour," said the surgeon.

He could well be spared. The brother and sister had now neither eye nor
thought except for each other.

The surgeon's face changed as he closed the door. Every one of their
faces changed. As for the gentleman whose duty took him now from ward to
ward, from one sick-bed to another, it was only by an effort that he
gave his cheerful words and courageous looks to the men who had found
day after day a tonic in his presence.

The brother and sister clasped each other's hands. Few were the words
they spoke. He was looking forward to the years before him, endeavoring
to steady himself, in a moment of weakness, by the remembrance of past
months of active service.

She was thinking of the days when she walked with her hero out of
delightsomeness and ease into danger and anxiety, a