Something of this mood was on Cecil to-night. Irresponsive to the
grand beauty of the poem he felt only its undertone of heartache and
woe.

"It is like human life," he thought, as he listlessly turned the
pages; "it is bright on the surface, but dark and terrible with pain
below. What a black mystery is life! what bitter irony of justice!
Hector is dragged at Achilles' chariot-wheel, and Paris goes free.
Helen returns to her home in triumph, while Andromache is left
desolate. Did Homer write in satire, and is the Iliad but a splendid
mockery of justice, human and divine? Or is life so sad that every
tale woven of it must needs become a tragedy?"

He pondered the gloomy puzzle of human existence long that night. At
length his brain grew over-weary, and he slept sitting in his chair,
his head resting on the pages of the open book.

How long he slept he knew not, but he awoke with a start to find a
hand laid on his shoulder and the tall figure of the Indian woman
standing beside him. He sprang up in sudden fear.

"Is she worse?" he cried. But the woman, with that light noiseless
step, that mute stolidity so characteristic of her race, had already
glided to the door; and there was no need for her to answer, for
already his own apprehensions had replied.

He was in the room almost as soon as she. His wife was much worse; and
hastening through the night to a neighboring farmhouse, he roused its
inmates, despatched a messenger for the physician, and returned,
accompanied by several members of the neighbor's family.

The slow moments dragged away like years as they watched around her.
It seemed as if the doctor would never come. To the end of his life
Cecil never forgot the long-drawn agony of that night.

At length their strained hearing caught the quick tread of horses'
hoofs on the turf without.

"The doctor, the doctor!" came simultaneously from the lips of Cecil
and the watchers. The doctor,--there was hope in the very name.

How eagerly they watched his face as he bent over the patient! It was
a calm, self-contained face, but they saw a shadow flit over it, a
sudden almost imperceptible change of expression that said "Death" as
plainly as if he had spoken it. They could do nothing, he
said,--nothing but wait for the end to come.

How the moments lingered! Sometimes Cecil bent over the sufferer with
every muscle quivering to her paroxysms; sometimes he could endure it
no longer and went out into the cool nig