return for mine: I was not so bad as that. And I was true in
heart to him notwithstanding my pride, for I had a real affection for
him. I had not seen his sister--to speak to I mean--since that Sunday
night.

One Saturday afternoon, as we were having a game something like hare
and hounds, I was running very hard through the village, when I set my
foot on a loose stone, and had a violent fall. When I got up, I saw
Jamie Duff standing by my side, with a face of utter consternation. I
discovered afterwards that he was in the way of following me about.
Finding the blood streaming down my face, and remarking when I came to
myself a little that I was very near the house where Turkey's mother
lived, I crawled thither, and up the stairs to her garret, Jamie
following in silence. I found her busy as usual at her wheel, and
Elsie Duff stood talking to her, as if she had just run in for a
moment and must not sit down. Elsie gave a little cry when she saw the
state I was in, and Turkey's mother got up and made me take her chair
while she hastened to get some water. I grew faint, and lost my
consciousness. When I came to myself I was leaning against Elsie,
whose face was as white as a sheet with dismay. I took a little water
and soon began to revive.

When Turkey's mother had tied up my head, I rose to go home, but she
persuaded me to lie down a while. I was not unwilling to comply. What
a sense of blissful repose pervaded me, weary with running, and
perhaps faint with loss of blood, when I stretched myself on the bed,
whose patchwork counterpane, let me say for Turkey's mother, was as
clean as any down quilt in chambers of the rich. I remember so well
how a single ray of sunlight fell on the floor from the little window
in the roof, just on the foot that kept turning the spinning-wheel.
Its hum sounded sleepy in my ears. I gazed at the sloping ray of
light, in which the ceaseless rotation of the swift wheel kept the
motes dancing most busily, until at length to my half-closed eyes it
became a huge Jacob's ladder, crowded with an innumerable company of
ascending and descending angels, and I thought it must be the same
ladder I used to see in my dream. The drowsy delight which follows on
the loss of blood possessed me, and the little garret with the
slanting roof, and its sloping sun-ray, and the whirr of the wheel,
and the form of the patient woman that span, had begun to gather about
them the hues of Paradise to my slowly fading