in her father. M.
Linders, however still lay as she had left him, and perhaps
the sight of his pale bloodless face chilled her, for she
crept silently to her corner, and took up her book again,
without saying a word of her new hopes. Presently Graham,
looking up from his writing, found that she had done the best
thing possible under the circumstances, for, with her book
lying open upon her lap, and her head resting against the
window-frame, she had fallen fast asleep. He went up to her,
raised her gently in his arms, and carried her into her own
room; so perfectly sound asleep was she, that she hardly
stirred, even when he laid her on her bed; and then, drawing
the curtain round her, he left her to herself.

If this long morning had passed slowly and sadly for our
sorrowful little Madelon, it had been a time of anxiety and
uneasiness enough for Horace Graham also; who had never, I
daresay, felt more nervous than during these quiet hours when
M. Linders, partly from the effects of his accident, partly
from the opiates that had been given him, lay unconscious. He
was young in his profession, and though clever and skilled
enough in the technical part, he had had little experience in
what may be called the moral part of it, and he positively
shrank form the moment when this man, of whose life and
character he knew something, should wake up, and he should
have to tell him that he was dying. It was so absolutely
necessary, too, that he should know the danger he was in; for
if, as was too probable from his mode of life, his affairs
were in disorder, and his arrangements for his child's future
had still to be made, the time that remained to him was in all
human probability but short. For the rest, Graham felt in
himself small capacity for preaching or exhortation, and
indeed from a professional point of view, he dreaded a
possible outburst of excitement and remorse, as lessening his
last chance of saving his patient's life; and yet to him--
young, full of energy, and hope, and resolution, though no
nearer perfection and tried wisdom than any other man with
crude beliefs and enthusiasms and untested powers for good or
evil--to him death still appeared one of the most awful facts
in life, and he could not think unmoved of the task of
announcing to such a man as this, that his last chances were
over, and such life as one can live in this world was for him
a thing of the past for ever now. Not a twelvemonth later,
Graham had