veil, and a voice, low, soft, but thrilling
through my heart like a new existence, murmured, "She is here!"

I forgot my wounds; I forgot my pain and my debility; I sprang upwards:
the stranger drew aside the veil from her countenance, and I beheld
Isora!

"Yes!" said she, in her own liquid and honeyed accents, which fell like
balm upon my wound and my spirit, "yes, she whom _you_ have hitherto
tended is come, in her turn, to render some slight but woman's services
to you. She has come to nurse, and to soothe, and to pray for you, and
to be, till you yourself discard her, your hand-maid and your slave!"

I would have answered, but raising her finger to her lips, she arose
and vanished; but from that hour my wound healed, my fever slaked, and
whenever I beheld her flitting round my bed, or watching over me, or
felt her cool fingers wiping the dew from my brow, or took from her hand
my medicine or my food, in those moments, the blood seemed to make a
new struggle through my veins, and I felt palpably within me a fresh and
delicious life--a life full of youth and passion and hope--replace the
vaguer and duller being which I had hitherto borne.

There are some extraordinary incongruities in that very mysterious thing
_sympathy_. One would imagine that, in a description of things most
generally interesting to all men, the most general interest would be
found; nevertheless, I believe few persons would hang breathless over
the progressive history of a sick-bed. Yet those gradual stages from
danger to recovery, how delightfully interesting they are to all who
have crawled from one to the other! and who, at some time or other in
his journey through that land of diseases--civilized life--has not
taken that gentle excursion? "I would be ill any day for the pleasure
of getting well," said Fontenelle to me one morning with his usual
_naivete_; but who would not be ill for the more pleasure of being ill,
if he could be tended by her whom he most loves?

I shall not therefore dwell upon that most delicious period of my
life,--my sick bed, and my recovery from it. I pass on to a certain
evening in which I heard from Isora's lips the whole of her history,
save what related to her knowledge of the real name of one whose
persecution constituted the little of romance which had yet mingled with
her innocent and pure life. That evening--how well I remember it!--we
were alone; still weak and reduced, I lay upon the sofa beside the
window