aching body, smooth
many a sick man's pillow, ere the night-lamps were lighted in the wards.

If she had chanced to look up at him just then, while he, with scared,
astonished eyes, was glancing at her, it is impossible to say what words
might have escaped him, or what might have forever been prevented
utterance. But she was not looking. What heavenly angel turned her eyes
away?

And now, before him whose prerogative was Victory, what vision did
arise? An apocalyptic vision: blackness of darkness forever, and side by
side with chaos, fair fields of living green, through which a young girl
walked towards a womanhood as fair as hers who sat beside him.
Unconscious of wrong that child, and yet how deeply, how variously
wronged! If he had meditated a great robbery, he could not have quailed
in the light of the discovered enormity as he did now before the vision
of his Janet.

Years upon years of struggle and of conquest could hardly give to the
surgeon of Frere's a more notable victory, one which could fill his soul
with a serener sense of triumph, than this hour gave, when he sat on the
old stone wall that guarded shore from sea, with the child's letter in
his hands, which had not miscarried, but had moved straight,
straight--do not Divine providences always?--as an arrow to its mark.

* * * * *

Out of the secret place of strength he came, and he held that letter
open towards Miss Ames.

"Here's something to be thought of," said he, endeavoring to speak in a
natural and easy tone of voice. "I don't know that I could ask for
better counsel than yours. My little girl has written me a letter. I
didn't know that she could write. See what work she has made of it. But
what sort of parents can she have, do you think, twelve years old, and
writing a thing like that?"

Miss Ames laid aside, or rather, to speak correctly, she _dropped_ the
newspapers. There was nothing in all their printed columns to compare
with this item of intelligence,--that the surgeon had a living wife and
a living daughter. She took the letter he was holding towards her, and
said, "Indeed, Doctor," quite as naturally as he had spoken. But she did
not look at him. She read the letter,--every misspelled word of
it,--then she said: "Perhaps it doesn't say much for the parents. But
something--I should think a great deal--for the child. Strange you
didn't tell me about her before. But I like to have her introduce
herself."