he whispered stories of the
sisters in the long evenings, and, half-heard, try and make an end to
them; to look drowsily down into the garden, where the afternoon
sunshine was still so summer-like that a few holly-hocks persisted in
showing their honest red faces along the walls, and the very leaves
that filled the paths would not wither, but kept up a wholesome ruddy
brown. One of the sisters had a poultry-yard in it, which he could
see: the wall around it was of stone covered with a brown feathery
lichen, which every rooster in that yard was determined to stand on, or
perish in the attempt; and Holmes would watch, through the quiet,
bright mornings, the frantic ambition of the successful aspirant with
an amused smile.

"One 'd thenk," said Lois, sagely, "a chicken never stood on a wall
before, to hear 'em, or a hen laid an egg."

Nor did Holmes smile once because the chicken burlesqued man: his
thought was too single for that yet. It was long, too, before he
thought of the people who came in quietly to see him as anything but
shadows, or wished for them to come again. Lois, perhaps, was the most
real thing in life then to him: growing conscious, day by day, as he
watched her, of his old life over the gulf. Very slowly conscious: with
a weak groping to comprehend the sudden, awful change that had come on
him, and then forgetting his old life, and the change, and the pity he
felt for himself, in the vague content of the fire-lit room, and his
nurse with her interminable knitting through the long afternoons, while
the sky without would thicken and gray, and a few still flakes of snow
would come drifting down to whiten the brown fields,--with no chilly
thought of winter, but only to make the quiet autumn more quiet.
Whatever honest, commonplace affection was in the man came out in a
simple way to this Lois, who ruled his sick whims and crotchets in such
a quiet, sturdy fashion. Not because she had risked her life to save
his; even when he understood that, he recalled it with an uneasy, heavy
gratitude; but the drinks she made him, and the plot they laid to
smuggle in some oysters in defiance of all rules, and the cheerful,
pock-marked face, he never forgot.

Doctor Knowles came sometimes, but seldom: never talked, when he did
come: late in the evening generally: and then would punch his skin, and
look at his tongue, and shake the bottles on the mantel-shelf with a
grunt that terrified Lois into the belief that the