le's eyes open wide.

"Fifty dollars!" he exclaimed in awe, "That's right, son--'Give up all
thou hast and follow Me.' 'It is harder fer a rich man to enter into
heaven than fer a camuel to go thoo the eye of a needle.' That's the way
to git religion!--"

The teacher bowed, gravely. "The Woman's Ward is now an accomplished
fact. Thank you, Mr. Channing."

For the first part of the journey down the mountain, the author had
rather enjoyed the novel role of uncomplaining sufferer. The teacher's
presence was both stimulating and reassuring. After he turned back,
however, with a final look at the bandages, reaction set in. The
sufferer's cheerfulness relapsed into a wincing silence, broken
occasionally by faint groans, when a stumble on the part of his bearers
set loose all the various aches that racked his body.

These aches were the result of exhaustion rather than of his wound; but
he did not know this, nor did Jacqueline. The literary imagination
pictured him in the last stages of blood-poison, and groans became more
frequent. He could have found no surer way of appealing to Jacqueline's
tenderness. She was one of the women to whom weakness is a thing
irresistible. Her moment of ugly doubt when her lover showed panic under
fire had passed instantly with a realization of his dependence upon her.
To give is the instinct of such natures, maternal in their very essence.
The fact that Channing seemed to need her had always been his chief hold
on her fancy.

She walked beside him most of the way, leading her mule, so that she
might hold his hand; yearning over him, suffering far more than he
suffered, crooning tender words of encouragement.

"I wish," she said once, passionately, "that you were littler, that you
were small enough to carry in my arms, so that _nothing_ could hurt
you!"--a sentiment which drew a glance of sympathy from even the stolid
young mountaineer at the mule's head, and which set old Brother Bates to
thinking wistfully of the long, long road that lay between him and the
ministrations of his wife, Sally.

But the author was too far gone in anxiety and bone-weariness to care to
linger just then in any primrose path of dalliance. He even wished
heartily, if inaudibly, that the girl would be quiet and leave him
alone.

Therefore, the final sight of Jemima and her business-like ambulance was
a most welcome one.

He demurred politely when he heard where he was to be taken. "I ought
not to impose on y