y more from the bed to which she was growing
curiously accustomed.

Then there came a new doctor to see Jenny. He was a very clever
specialist from a distant town; but for him the business of death had
not yet obscured its tragedy,--though words like "tragedy" were not
often on his tongue. Consumption was a strong enough word for him.

His heart went out to that little household; and when he saw Jenny, it
ached for that young man downstairs. It was more than a professional
contempt for the "general practitioner" that made him silently curse
what he called the "death-doctor," as he looked at Jenny, "Jack of all
diseases, and master of none."

"Two months ago, a month," he thought, as he listened and listened for a
sound of hope that might come to his ear through Jenny's wasted
side,--"even a month, and I could have saved her." And yet as he talked
to her he was not so sure, after all. He missed something in her voice.
It was the will to live.

"Have you had a shock at any time?" he said.

Jenny was taken by surprise for a moment,--the other doctor had asked
her that, too,--and she did not deny it so convincingly as she tried to.

"O, that's all right," said the doctor aloud to Jenny and her mother,
who stood by, though inwardly he said, "I see. That's the reason;" and
again he said, "I'm afraid you mustn't get up just yet. That chest of
yours has to be taken care of, but you needn't be anxious. In a month or
six weeks you'll be all right again."

"Only a month or six weeks," said Jenny, with a sinking voice. She
meant--was that all that was left to her of life and love?

Downstairs Theophil stood waiting with a beating heart. He sprang to the
door and drew the doctor into his room. The doctor laid a kind hand upon
his arm, and there was a look in his face that made Theophil's heart die
within him.

"You mean she is going to die?" he said with fearful calmness. "_You
mean that?_"

"My poor fellow, God knows what I would give to deny it."

"She--is--going--to--die--_to die!_ It is impossible! Not Jenny!" and
between that exclamation and his first stunned cry it seemed as though
bells had been tolling a thousand years. It seemed as though he had been
sitting there as in a cave since the beginning of time, saying over and
over to himself, "Jenny is going to die."

There was a decanter on the sideboard. The doctor poured some spirit
into a glass. "Drink this," he said. Theophil drank it raw, as though it
had be