the close of the season, when
a sudden suggestion of the coming autumn had crept, one knew not how,
into the heart of a perfect day; when even a return of the summer
warmth had a suspicion of hectic,--on one of these days Sarah Walker
was missed with the bees and the butterflies. For two days her voice
had not been heard in hall or corridor, nor had the sunshine of her
French marigold head lit up her familiar places. The two days were
days of relief, yet mitigated with a certain uneasy apprehension of the
return of Sarah Walker, or--more alarming thought!--the Sarah Walker
element in a more appalling form. So strong was this impression that
an unhappy infant who unwittingly broke this interval with his maiden
outcry was nearly lynched. "We're not going to stand that from YOU,
you know," was the crystallized sentiment of a brutal bachelor. In
fact, it began to be admitted that Greyport had been accustomed to
Sarah Walker's ways. In the midst of this, it was suddenly whispered
that Sarah Walker was lying dangerously ill, and was not expected to
live.

Then occurred one of those strange revulsions of human sentiment which
at first seem to point the dawning of a millennium of poetic justice,
but which, in this case, ended in merely stirring the languid pulses of
society into a hectic fever, and in making sympathy for Sarah Walker an
insincere and exaggerated fashion. Morning and afternoon visits to her
apartment, with extravagant offerings, were de rigueur; bulletins were
issued three times a day; an allusion to her condition was the
recognized preliminary to all conversation; advice, suggestions, and
petitions to restore the baleful existence, flowed readily from the
same facile invention that had once proposed its banishment; until one
afternoon the shadow had drawn so close that even Folly withheld its
careless feet before it, and laid down its feeble tinkling bells and
gaudy cap tremblingly on the threshold. But the sequel must be told in
more vivid words than mine.

"Whin I saw that angel lyin' there," said Sarah Walker's nurse, "as
white, if ye plaze, as if the whole blessed blood of her body had gone
to make up the beautiful glory of her hair; speechless as she was, I
thought I saw a sort of longin' in her eyes.

"'Is it anythin' you'll be wantin', Sarah darlint', sez her mother with
a thremblin' voice, 'afore it's lavin' us ye are? Is it the ministher
yer askin' for, love?' sez she.

"And Sarah looked