. Harold, nor
himself could take a moment's rest until everything was done that could
be done, they should all feel extremely unhappy, miserable--if she
should refuse them. If she would but stop to think of it, she must
realize that.

Penelope agreed to this.

She had cried so much that she was the picture of living despair, she
was thinking of nothing but her husband and his pain; but she forced a
momentary attention towards Winthrop, who was talking so earnestly to
her, trying to make some impression.

He could see that he did not make much.

"Your husband gave his life--it amounted to that--to save Margaret's;
she was nothing to him--that is, no relative, not even a near friend,
yet he faced for her the most horrible of deaths. If it had not been for
him, that would have been _her_ death, and think, then, Mrs. Moore,
think what _we_ should be feeling now." He had meant to say this
steadily, but he could not. His voice became choked, he got up quickly
and went to the window.

Penelope, who, tired as she was, and with one hand pressed constantly
against her weak back, was yet sitting on the edge of a hard wooden
chair, ready to jump up and run into the next room at an instant's
notice, tried again to detach her mind from her husband long enough to
think of what it was this man was saying to her; she liked Margaret, and
therefore she succeeded sufficiently well to answer, "It would have been
_terrible_." Then her thoughts went back to Middleton again.

"Don't you see, then," said Winthrop, returning, "that, standing as we
do almost beside her grave, your husband has become the most precious
person in the world to us? How _can_ you hesitate?" he said, breaking
off, "how can you deny us the pleasure of doing everything possible--so
little at best--to help him in his great suffering?"

"Oh yes--his suffering! his suffering!" moaned the wife, the tears
dropping down her white cheeks without any distortion of feature. Her
eyes looked large; singularly enough, though she was so exhausted, her
countenance appeared younger than he had ever seen it; under the
all-absorbing influence of her grief its usual expressions had gone and
one could trace again the outlines of youth; her girlhood face--almost
her little-girl face--had come strangely back, as it does sometimes
after death, when grandchildren see, with startled, loving surprise,
what "grandma" was when she too was only sixteen.

Winthrop took her thin worn hand an