make me; then you would repent."

She was silent, agitated in every fibre of her, but thinking hard.

"What put that idea into your head?" she whispered, still holding his
hand.

"It was never put in; it was there always--since you were a kiddie."

"It seems so strange! I thought I was always a kiddie to you." "That
does seem the natural relationship, doesn't it?" There fell another
long silence, and, listening to his dragging breath, her heart smote
her. She squeezed his bony hand.

"I will stay with you, anyway," she comforted him.

He turned his head on the pillow. "Kiss me," he sighed, with eyes
closed.

She did, again and again.

The night was suffocating. She could not sleep for the heat and her
thoughts, and when, towards morning, she heard the nurse stirring, she
got up to inquire how he was.

"Pretty bad," the nurse said. "It's this awful weather. I can't cool
the room, though I've got all the doors and windows open, and the wet
sheets hanging up. It's air he wants, and there isn't any. If it don't
change soon, I'm afraid his strength won't hold out."

It did not change, and consequently grew worse to bear, the parching
and scorching of each day being carried over into the next. What the
newspapers call a heat-wave was drawing to its culmination, which
generally reaches the verge of the unbearable, even to the well and
strong, just before the "change"--that lightning change to coolness,
and even coldness, which comes while one draws a breath. How many a
life has hung upon the chance of the blessed moment coming in time!

The nurse looked at the thermometer in despair. Darkness had not taken
10 degrees from yesterday's temperature of 102 degrees when another
blazing sun arose. The fierce wind had raved and calmed, and raved and
calmed, but it had not shifted. She wetted and she fanned, turn and
turn about with Deb, the livelong day, without freshening the dead air
that soaked the house and seemed to soak the world. The fagged and
perspiring doctor (a great friend of the patient's), who came twice
daily, came again, too tired to care very much even for this special
case. He looked at it, and shook his head, and begged for a cool drink
for the Lord's sake; and then, having muddled the wits he had tried to
stimulate with quarts of whisky-and-soda, went away, saying: "I can do
nothing. Send for me at once if you see a change."

At sunset the sick man was very low, his weak heart and his distressed
lun