breast and kissed her tenderly.

"It is your brother, darling," she gently said. "God has given me a
son!"

Well she knew that he was not yet entirely her own--that she would have
to wrestle fiercely with Death for his possession. But she had made up
her mind that she would win the battle.

"Death _shall_ not have him," she passionately told herself.

But the next moment, overwhelmed with a realization of human
helplessness, she was upon her knees at his bedside, crying:

"Oh, God, do not let him die! I have but just found him! Spare him to me
now, if but a little while!"

CHAPTER XIX.

For many days the sick man lay with eyes closed in uneasy sleep or open,
but unseeing, and with body writhing and tongue loosed but incoherent,
showing that these half-waking hours, as well as the sleeping ones, were
"horror haunted."

Finally the most terrible of dreams visited him. The circumstances of
his life had caused him from his infancy to dwell much upon the subject
of death. He had oftentimes taken a gruesome pleasure in trying to
imagine all the sensations of the grim passage into the "Valley of the
Shadow"--even to the closing of the coffin-lid and the descent into the
grave. Now, in his fever-dream, the dreadful details and sensations
imagined in health came to him, but with tenfold vividness. At the point
when in the blackness and suffocation of conscious burial horror had
reached its extremest limit and the sufferer was upon the verge of real
death from sheer terror, relief came. He seemed to feel himself freed
from the closeness, the maddening fight for breath, of the coffin, and
gently, surely, borne upward out of the abyss ... upward ... upward ...
into air--light--life!

For a long while he lay quite still, too exhausted to move hand or
foot--to raise his eyelids even; but content--more--happy, perfectly
happy, in the glorious consciousness of being able just to lie still and
breathe the sweet air of day.

Presently, as he began to feel rested, the great grey eyes opened. For
the first time since the conqueror, Fever, had overthrown him and bound
him to the uneasy bed of straw, they were clear as the sky after a
storm--swept clean of every cob-web cloud; but their lucid depths were
filled with surprise, for they opened upon a cool, light, homelike
chamber. The walls around him were white, but were relieved here and
there by restful prints in narrow black frames. The four-post bed upon
which he la