ust not keep you; but let me help while I stay."

So the broth was poured forth and prepared, and with it Arabella
disappeared. She returned in a few minutes, beckoned to Caroline, and
said in a low voice:

"Come in--say you forgive him! Oh, you need not fear him; a babe could
not fear him now!"

Caroline followed Arabella into the sick-room. No untidiness there; all
so carefully, thoughtfully arranged. A pleasant room, too--with windows
looking full on the sunniest side of the Vale of Health; the hearth
so cheerily clear, swept so clean--the very ashes out of sight;
flowers--costly exotics--on the table, on the mantelpiece; the
couch drawn towards the window; and on that couch, in the gay rich
dressing-gown of former days, warm coverlets heaped on the feet,
snow-white pillows propping the head, lay what at first seemed a vague,
undistinguishable mass--lay what, as the step advanced, and the eye
became more accurately searching, grew into Jasper Losely.

Yes, there, too weak indeed for a babe to fear, lay all that was left
of the Strong Man! No enemy but himself had brought him thus
low-spendthrift, and swindler, and robber of his own priceless
treasures--Health and Strength--those grand rent-rolls of joy which
Nature had made his inheritance. As a tree that is crumbling to dust
under the gnarls of its bark seems, the moment ere it falls, proof
against time and the tempest, so, within all decayed, stood that image
of strength-so, air scarcely stirring, it fell. "And the pitcher was
broken at the fountain; and the wheel was broken at the cistern; vanity
of vanities, saith the Preacher."

Jasper turned his dull eye towards Caroline, as she came softly to
his side, and looked at her with a piteous gaze. The stroke that had
shattered the form had spared the face; and illness and compulsory
abstinence from habitual stimulants had taken from the aspect much
of the coarseness--whether of shape or colour--that of late years had
disfigured its outline--and supplied the delicacy which ends with youth
by the delicacy that comes with the approach of death. So that, in no
small degree, the beauty which had been to him so fatal a gift, was once
more visible--the features growing again distinct, as wanness succeeded
to the hues of intemperance, and emaciation to the bloated cheeks and
swollen muscle. The goddess whose boons adorn the outward shell of the
human spirit came back to her favourite's death-couch as she had come to
th