his bedside and
felt his pulse and looked at him very doubtfully, and that she, Mary,
called this personage "doctor," and asked him questions in a whisper.
But all within his own being was pain and bewilderment,--sometimes he
felt as though he were one drop in a burning whirlpool of madness--and
sometimes he seemed to himself to be spinning round and round in a haze
of blinding rain, of which the drops were scalding hot, and heavy as
lead,--and occasionally he found that he was trying to get out of bed,
uttering cries of inexplicable anguish, while at such moments, something
cool was placed on his forehead, and a gentle arm was passed round him
till the paroxysm abated, and he fell down again among his pillows
exhausted. Slowly, and as it were grudgingly, after many days, the
crisis of the illness passed and ebbed away in dull throbs of
agony,--and he sank into a weak lethargy that was almost like the
comatose condition preceding death. He lay staring at the ceiling for
hours, heedless as to whether he ever moved or spoke again. Some-one
came and put spoonfuls of liquid nourishment between his lips, and he
swallowed it mechanically without any sign of conscious appreciation.
White as white marble, and aged by many years, he remained stretched in
his rigid corpse-like attitude, his eyes always fixedly upturned, till
one day he was roused from his deepening torpor by the sound of sobbing.
With a violent effort he brought his gaze down from the ceiling, and saw
a figure kneeling by his bed, and a mass of bronze brown hair falling
over a face concealed by two shapely white hands through which the tears
were falling. Feebly astonished, he stretched out his thin, trembling
fingers to touch that wonderful bright mesh of waving tresses, and
asked--

"What is this? Who--who is crying?"

The hidden face was uplifted, and two soft eyes, wet with weeping,
looked up hopefully.

"It's Mary!" said a trembling voice--"You know me, don't you? Oh,
dearie, if you would but try to rouse yourself, you'd get well even
now!"

He gazed at her in a kind of childish admiration.

"It's Mary!" he echoed, faintly--"And who is Mary?"

"Don't you remember?" And rising from her knees, she dashed away her
tears and smiled at him--"Or is it too hard for you to think at all
about it just now? Didn't I find you out on the hills in the storm, and
bring you home here?--and didn't I tell you that my name was Mary?"

He kept his eyes upon her wistful