on the pillow, smoothing the
blankets about me, trying to speak, but only choking, in a ridiculous
fashion.

"And the opera, and the drug-shop, and"----

I held my hand to my head.

"The truth is," said Jacky, bobbing out from behind the curtains, her
eyes suspiciously red and shiny, "I'm afraid you've had some bad dreams,
dear. Just take a teaspoonful of this, that's a good soul! You've been
ill, you see. Brain-fever, and what not. The very day we came to
Newport. Uncle Daniel and Robert found you on the cliff."

"When we came from the hotel, you remember?" still pulling the blanket
up, his lip unsteady.

"You'll choke her; what a nurse you are, to be sure, Uncle Dan! And the
woman's feet as bare"----

"There, there, Jacky! I know,"--submissively, twitching at my nightcap,
and then gathering my head into his arms until I could hear how his
heart throbbed under the strong chest. "My wife! Hetty! Hetty!" he
whispered.

I knew he was thanking God for giving me to him again. I dared not think
of God, or him: God, that had given me another chance.

I lay there until morning, weak and limp, on his arm, touching it now
and then to be sure it was alive, an actual flesh-and-blood arm,--that I
was not a murderer. Weak as any baby: and it seemed to me--it comes to
me yet as a great truth--that God had let me be born again: that He, who
gave a new life to the thief in his last foul breath, had given me, too,
another chance to try again. Jacky, who was the most arbitrary of
nurses, coiled herself up on the foot of the bed, and kept her unwinking
eyes sharp on us to enforce silence. Never were eyes more healthful and
friendly, I thought feebly. But I tried all the time to press my poor
head in closer to my husband's breast: I was barely free from that
vacuum of death and crime, and in there were the strength and life that
were to save me; I knew that. God, who had brought me to this, alone
knew how I received it: whether it was a true wife that lay on Daniel
Manning's bosom that night; how I loathed the self I had worshipped so
long; how the misused, diseased body and soul were alive with love for
him, craved a week's, a day's life to give themselves utterly to him, to
creep closer to him and the Father that he knew so simply and so well. I
heard him once in the night, when he thought I was asleep, say to
himself something of the wife who had been restored to him, who "was
dead and is alive again, was lost and is found."