and prayed oftener than usual--not for the girl's
life, as Thomas Jefferson noticed with deep stirrings of bitterness, but
that the dispensation of Providence might inure to the lasting and
eternal benefit of an impenitent and idolatrous Major Dabney.

Throughout these four days the sickening August heat remained unbroken;
but on the fifth the thunderheads began to gather and a fresh breeze
swept down from the slopes of the distant Cumberland; a wind smelling
sweetly of rain and full of cooling promise.

On this fifth day, Thomas Jefferson, lying in wait at the gate of the
manor-house grounds, waylaid Doctor Williams coming out, and asked the
question which had hitherto had its doleful answer without the necessity
of asking. If the doctor had struck him with the buggy whip the shock
would not have been more real than that consequent on the snapping of
mental tension strings and the surging, strangling uprush of the tidal
wave of relief.

"Little Ardea?" said the doctor. "Oh, she'll do well enough now, I hope.
The fever is broken and she's asleep."

Thomas Jefferson shut the gate mechanically when the doctor had driven
out; but when there was nothing more to hold him, he scrambled over the
stone wall on the opposite side of the pike and ran for the hills like
one demented.

The girl would live! Hell had yawned and cast him up once more on the
pleasant, homely earth; and now the gentle rain of penitence, which
could never water the dry places for a soul in torment, drenched him
like the real rain which was falling to slake the thirst of the parched
fields and the brittle-leaved, rustling forest.

For a long time he lay on his face on the first bit of tree-sheltered
grass he had come to, caring nothing for the storm which was driving all
the wild creatures of the wood to cover. God had not been so pitiless,
after all. There was yet a balm in Gilead.

And for the future? O just Heavens! how straitly and circumspectly he
would walk all the days of his life! Never again should Satan, going
about like a roaring lion, take him unawares. He would even learn to
love the girl, as one should love an enemy; and when she should come and
tell him that all the sacred places were hers by her grandfather's
right, he would smile reproachfully, like the boy being led forth to the
stake in the _Book of Martyrs_, and say--

But the time was not yet fully come for self-pityings; and when Thomas
Jefferson went home after the shower,