. Oglethorpe. Oh, monsieur, is it true that he is dying?--will
he never get well? How could it happen? He was so strong only a few days
since. He must not die. It cannot be true that he will die--he has so
many friends who love him."

Monsieur, the doctor, softened perceptibly under this; she was so young
and innocent-looking, this girlish little English mademoiselle. Monsieur
up-stairs must be a lucky man to have won her tender young heart so
utterly. Strange and equivocal a thing as the pretty child (she seemed a
child to him) was doing, he never for an instant doubted the ignorant
faith and love that shone in the depths of her beautiful agonized eyes.
He bowed to her as deferentially as to a sultana, when he made his
answer.

"It had been an accident," he commenced. "The stage had overturned on
its way, and monsieur being in it, had been thrown out by its falling
into a gully. His collar-bone had been broken, and several of his ribs
fractured; but the worst of his injuries had been a gash on his head--a
sharp stone had done it. Mademoiselle would understand wherein the
danger lay. He was unconscious at present."

This he told her on their way to the chamber up-stairs; but even the
gravity of his manner did not prepare her for the sight the opening of
the door revealed to her. Handsome Denis Oglethorpe lay upon the narrow
little bed with the face of a dying man, which is far worse than that of
a dead man. There were spots of blood on his pillow and upon his
garments; he was bandaged from head to foot, it seemed, with ghastly
red, wet bandages; his eyes were glazed, and his jaw half dropped.

A low, wild cry broke from the pale lips of the figure in the door-way,
and the next instant Theodora North had flown to the bedside and dropped
upon her knees by it, hiding her deathly-stricken young face upon her
lover's lifeless hand, forgetting Splaighton, forgetting the doctor,
forgetting even Priscilla Gower, forgetting all but that she, in this
moment, knew that she could not give him up, even to the undivided quiet
of death.

"He will die! He will die!" she cried out. "And I never told him. Oh, my
love! love! Oh, my dearest, dear!"

The little, old doctor drew back, half way, through a suddenly stranger
impulse of sympathy. He was uneasily conscious of the fact, that the
staid, elderly person at his side was startled and outraged
simultaneously by this passionate burst of grief on the part of her
young mistress. He