ch as me. When I
come to die, I'd like eyes such as his to look at, tender, pitiful."

"Women are fools alike," grumbled the Doctor. "Never mind. 'When you
come to die?' What put that into your head? Look up."

The child sheltered the flaring candle with her hand.

"I've no tho't o' dyin'," she said, laughing.

There was a gray shadow about her eyes, a peaked look to the face, he
never saw before, looking at her now with a physician's eyes.

"Does anything hurt you here?" touching her chest.

"It's better now. It was that night o' th' fire. Th' breath o' th'
mill, I thenk,--but it's nothin'."

"Burning copperas? Of course it's better! Oh, that's nothing!" he
said, cheerfully.

When they reached the door, he held out his hand, the first time he
ever had done it to her, and then waited, patting her on the head.

"I think it'll come right, Lois," he said, dreamily, looking out into
the night. "You're a good girl. I think it'll all come right. For
you and me. Some time. Good-night, child."

After he was a long way down the street, he turned to nod good-night
again to the comical little figure in the door-way.

CHAPTER IX.

If Knowles hated anybody that night, he hated the man he had left
standing there with pale, heavy jaws, and heart of iron; he could have
cursed him, standing there. He did not see how, after he was left
alone, the man lay with his face to the wall, holding his bony hand to
his forehead, with a look in his eyes that if you had seen, you would
have thought his soul had entered on that path whose steps take hold on
hell.

There was no struggle in his face; whatever was the resolve he had
reached in the solitary hours when he had stood so close upon the
borders of death, it was unshaken now; but the heart, crushed and
stifled before, was taking its dire revenge. If ever it had hungered,
through the cold, selfish days, for God's help, or a woman's love, it
hungered now, with a craving like death. If ever he had thought how
bare and vacant the years would be, going down to the grave with lips
that never had known a true wife's kiss, he remembered it now, when it
was too late, with bitterness such as wrings a man's heart but once in
a lifetime. If ever he had denied to his own soul this Margret, called
her alien or foreign, it called her now, when it was too late, to her
rightful place; there was not a thought nor a hope in the darkest
depths of his nature that did not cry out