ht.

JOHN B. TABB.

THROUGH WINDING WAYS.

CHAPTER VII.

It was the tenth of November when my accident happened: it was late in
February before I again sat up and began to feel once more that I
belonged to the world of flesh and blood, and to take in slowly, with
unaccustomed mind and ear, sights and sounds outside the monotonous
world of pain where I had lived so long that I felt bitterly I had
earned the right to die. Few glimpses of light had enlivened the
terrible blackness of my cruel experience: they had all come from my
mother's smile. Occasionally, for a few moments when I lay with my head
upon her breast, I was reinspired with a desire to live; but at most
times a settled sense of suffering and gloom cut me off from every sweet
source of comfort in life. But after I had sat up once--once parted with
the dreary prospect of the chintz and lace which curtained my bed--I was
a little stronger. Deep was the silence of the icebound shore that day,
sparkling the blue waters across which the sun marked a glittering
track. My mother sat beside me, and Helen knelt by my reclining-chair
watching my face with eager, earnest eyes, divining every wish and
foreseeing all my needs. She served me with such an enthusiasm of
devotion that in my morbid state, with every nerve strained to its
highest tension, I suffered merely in looking at her. But Dr. Sharpe
himself had begged me to let her stay with me, because she fretted so
when away from me. I had but one wish in life, it seemed to me--to get
back to Belfield. The luxury with which I was surrounded was an
oppression to my every sense. I was fed from priceless porcelain, and
the markets were ransacked to find dainties for my taste; my room was
freshly decorated every day with flowers, both cut and growing in pots,
and the air was heavy with their scents; forced fruits from the
greenhouses, heaped in silver baskets on every table toward which I
turned, tempted my dull appetite. I wanted my old room at home: I wanted
to lie in my hard narrow bed and see the walls flush with the reflection
of the dawn in the east--to have Carlo lift the latch of my door, and
enter stealthily and stand at my bedside, wagging his tail and looking
up at me with his solemn brown eyes as he waited for me to stretch out
my hand, that he might lick it all over for his good-morning. There, in
those dear familiar places, I should be able to think over the evil that
had come upon me--migh