OF THE APPROACH OF LIZARANN'S RETURN, AND HOW JIM'S HOPES WERE FED BY OLD DAVID. HOW JIM DID NOT CURSE A MOTOR-CAR. HOW LIZARANN DIED OF TUBERCULOSIS

So it had come about that for weeks past news of Lizarann, that none could doubt the meaning of, came to the Rectory, and that all of it that passed on to her Daddy reached him corrected out of all knowledge—the sting withdrawn.

Had he been able to read the letters that contained it himself, this would not have been possible. Some may have a stone ready to cast at Athelstan Taylor for this. The story has none. It was a question with the Rector of allowing poor Jim a few more days of false hope in order that he himself might be beside him in the first of his despair. His own easiest course, far and away, would have been to read Adeline Fossett's last letter to the poor fellow aloud, say, "God's will be done!" and so forth, and get away to Chipping Chester. But he had it in his mind to go to Jim when the use of the knife became inevitable, and remain with him, if Mrs. Fox were still away, at least until the day of her return. He shrank from leaving him alone in the cottage, a tortured soul in a sunless universe, within reach of a razor.

Had he conceived for one moment what the speed of events would be, his course might have been different. But the letters that he could not read aloud to Jim were misleading on one point. The writer caught constantly at the only easement words could be found for, that the actual hour or day, or even week, of Death could not be forecast. The dear little thing was not actually dying; she might live for weeks, even months. But the doctor here—said Miss Jane Fanshawe—who really had had immense experience, thought the case could only end one way. Still, the temperature was half a degree lower to-day, and we thought the air was beginning to tell. We should be able to see better when she was got back home, with her old surroundings. She fretted a good deal about her Daddy. That was the general tone of the penultimate letter. Then came the one Miss Fossett enclosed on with the telegram which followed it. It came too late for the Rector to modify his plan of operations. So Jim lived on by himself, and thought of his little lass, counting the days to her return. He spoke with no one, water-customers apart, except a neighbour who had undertaken to see to his needs in Mrs. Fox's absence. His dog was under the impression that it was he that was doing this, and there can be no doubt that he actually did conduct his master to and from the well. But nobody, except his canine self, believed that he had any share in cooking the dinner or making the beds.

Each long day that went by was a day nearer to the blind man's hearing of his child's voice. It would come, and would be hers once more—many times more than once. His reason might whisper to him of one end, and one alone, in some vague terrible future, to this insidious plague that had stolen on him like a thief in the night, to rob him of his happiness—the one jewel his darkness and his crippled limbs had left him. But that the hour was at hand, and the word spoken, that the light in his heart should be utterly quenched, and leave his soul to a darkness blacker than the void his eyesight had become—this was an idea it was not in him to receive, a thought that nature rose against.

No!—her return would be very soon now, and he knew how it would come. He had nothing to guide him to the day or the hour beyond his knowledge of the term first fixed—six weeks from the day of her departure. But he knew what would be his first hearing of it. She would call out to him—he was sure of that—the signal he had taught her to greet him with, in the old days of Bladen Street; the word he had listened for so many a time as he felt his way, touching with his stick the long blank wall he had to pass before he could feel her little hand in his. He dreamed and dwelt upon the moment when he should hear that call again, "Pi-lot!"

The villagers coming to the well for water were a great solace to him; a mine of robust hopefulness in which the choke-damp of misgiving was unknown. Often when Jim was downhearted about the little lass—had got a hump about her, as he phrased it—some village matron's voice would come to him like a breath of fresh air. "Yow'ull be having yower little maid back again vairy soon now, Master Coupland!" And the sympathetic confidence bred in Jim's own voice would help him to a conviction that it was well-grounded, as he answered, "Aye, mistress, sure! But a very little time to run now!" Even when the slight insecurity implied in the addendum, "Please God!"—making the little lass's return conditional on anything—weakened the robust language of unqualified Hope, Jim received it as a mere concession to the prejudices of Society. Besides, he and his Maker were on better terms now, since his initiation into church-music.

No note of alarm had reached the villagers; in fact, the Rector and his sister-in-law kept their information to themselves. Even Phoebe and Joan, when they paid Jim visits of consolation—every other day or thereabouts—were a reassuring element; though so near sources of better, or worse, information. They—poor little souls!—knew nothing of death close at hand, though alive to funerals, somewhat as a counsel's children might be alive to law-suits.

It was near the close of a cloudless day in the fourth week of that August that Jim, undisturbed by applicants for water, was enjoying his last pipe before starting for home. He was not alone. One of the very old men one knows so well in every village was with him; a survival of the past who will tell you tales of your grandfathers, and end them up with some memory of a grandchild of his own, then living. Death is keeping them in mind, be sure!—will not forget them in the end, even though they may tax his recollection for another decade. This one could remember his childhood better than the events of yesterday, and though he could tell but little of it, was not quite without a record of Waterloo. For he could recall how his father held him up, a child of five, to see the blaze on Crumwen Beacon yander, when they loighted up fires all round about for the news that had come of the great battle across the water. But as for Nelson and Trafalgar, inquired about keenly by Jim, as pages from the same book, he could say nothing of them; they were afower his time. But he minded when they painted up the sign of the Lord Nelson on the roo-ad to th' Castle, with an empty sleeve to his cwo-at; and the painter of un didn't know his trade, and put stoof with th' payunt to ma'ak it show up gay, and look at un now!

"It's a tidy bit o' time too, Master David," said Jim. "Many a year afore ever I was heard tell of."

"Aye well—that's so! But you'll be quite a yoong ma'an, coo-unting by years. Why, I lay you'll be yoonger by many a year than Peter Fox's widow—she that's gone to her sister in Loon'un."

"My old mother at the cottage? Ah, she'll be my age twice told, and a spell thrown in."

"Aye—aye! She's getting on, forward, now you ne'am it. But I mind her when she first came to these parts—just a yoong wench, not long wed—more by token my power missus lay dying at the time.... Noa!—I'd been marrud woonce afower then—marrud to Sarah Tracey—you may ree-ad her ne'am on the sto'an in the graveyard. But for Peter Fox's widow, she was a coomly yoong wench, shooerly!"

He wandered among domestic events, until the dog, feeling he was being taken too little notice of, remonstrated. The substance of his communication, interpreted by Jim, was that it was time to be getting back home. On the road, his opinion was they were going too slow, and he endeavoured to drag his master at a trot. Old David commented on the restlessness of youth.

"But you won't be needing th' yoong poop soon, Master Coupland. That little maid of yowern she'll be coomin' ba-ack, I lay, none so many days ahead."

Here was a chance for Jim to reassure himself.

"For all I could say," said he, "the lassie may be up at the Rectory now. She'd come with her lady, as I make it out; just for the first go off, seeing the old mother's not handy for to nurse her up. Not that there'd be the need for it, to my judgment. These here doctor's stories...."

The old man interrupted him, stopping in the road to speak, with an uplifted impressive finger. "Do'ant ye hearken to none o' they, Master Coupland. They be a main too clever, that they be! Why, I'm not the only ma'an with a tale to tell about they doctors?"

"What might your tale be, Master David?"

"My tale? Now I only say this to ye, Master Coupland. Just ye look at me.... Aye—be sure!—I should ha' said, feel hold of my arm.... There now!—where do ye find th' hospital pa'atient in that? Towerned o' ninety-nine year, last Whitsuntide! What'll your doctors ma'ak of that?"

"Won't they give you a clean bill, Master David?"

"Couldn't roightly say, Master Coupland, without consooltin' of 'em. And I can tell ye this much, they'll have to make shift without me; you may tell 'em so! Now, you hearken to me, not to they." The voice of the old boy, so nearly a centenarian, rose quite to vigour as he worked up his indignation against leechcraft. "That little maid of yowern, she has a bit o' cough o' nights?"

"Aye, aye!—a fair sort of a cough—comes and goes by the season."

"Ah!—and I lay, now and again o' nights, she'll sweat like to sop a flannel shirt through, like a spoonge?"

"And that's true, too!" "And happen she's thinned doon a bit?—happen she hasn't...?"

"To the touch o' my hand, belike! But I'm an onsartain judge—and that's the truth."

"Now I'm telling ye this." The old man stood still to make his tale the more impressive, his thousand wrinkles and his few grey hairs all fraught with emphasis that was lost on his hearer; though the sight of them in the afterglow might have held a passer-by, and made him listen. He repeated: "I'm tellin' ye this, Master Coupland. If ye could have handled me when I was a yoong lad of mebbe fowerteen year, or fifteen, you would just have felt through to th' boans. And the cough, night and mowerning—my word! You might well ha' thowt yower little maiden's just a gay trifle.... What said th' doctor?" The old man laughed scornfully, if toothlessly. "Said to my moother she might let the oonderta'aker measure me for my coffin. And she was that simple she took his word for it, and vairy nigh did ... ah!—you may be laughin'—but vairy nigh she did! And there was I the while, just turned off my food and drink for a spell! Groo-wun I was, I ta'ak it. And to hear doctor cha-atterin', cha-atterin'! Such a maze o' wo'ords, it passes thinkin' where he could have gotten so ma-any. Ha—ha—ho!" And the old man resumed his walk with, "Eighty-fower year agone, Master Coupland, and me here, hale and hearty, to tell the tale!"

And no doubt a good deal of the tale was true, and the good-will of its narrator past all question. But he was making the most of it for the sake of the pleasure it gave him to cheer up the blind man's loneliness, without thinking quite enough of his responsibility to truth. When he wished Master Coupland sound sleep and pleasant dreams at the gate of the little cottage, and went slowly on to his own home in the village, he was saying good-bye to a man only too ready to give the rein to the horses of the chariot of Hope, even without an excuse. And here he had one, surely.

So, through his lonely supper—for, granting it cooked and placed on the table, Jim had a marvellous faculty of shifting for himself—he was building a sweet castle in the air with the materials so good-naturedly placed at his disposal. He imagined to himself as a thing to be to-morrow, if it had not already come to pass to-day, a journey home of a reinstated Lizarann, all eagerness for her Daddy. Not an exorbitantly robust little lass—he would not be unreasonable—but one perceptibly better than the one that left him a month since; whose kisses he could still feel, was soon to feel again. As he lighted his pipe in the garden with a vesuvian—for he never lit it in the house when alone, for safety's sake—and sat smoking under the stars in the clematis arbour, now beginning to lose its glory, it glowed in unison with the fire of a stimulated hope the old man's tale had kindled. If old David had been worse off eighty-four years ago than Lizarann, why should not the child have many a long year of life before her—aye!—even after he, Jim, had borne the last of his troubles, and was laid beside Dolly in the grave? Short of that, why should not he at least treasure the hope of the month to come, with Lizarann herself beside him in the warmth of that late summer the gentleman had all but guaranteed? For this castle in Spain owed a great deal of its vividness to Challis's obliging meteorology. He had vouched for "St. Augustin's Summer," and it sounded well.

Then a painful thought came to him. It had fretted him before this, at intervals. How if that grave where Dolly lay could not be found? What did he know about it? Little enough! Priscilla knew; she had arranged all that—as Jim, for all his good-nature, suspected—with a certain ghoul-like joy. But suppose, when he himself came to an end, Lizarann wished to place as much as was left of him beside her mother, where was the Lizarann of that day to find her? Well!—he could do nothing about it now. He would speak to the master, and make a clear chart, for the lassie's sake. No question came in here of how he might be the survivor, and have to place her in her mother's grave. Old David's tale had been an opiate to thoughts like that, and his heart rested on it.

Oh yes!—Lizarann was due, to-morrow or next day at furthest. She would tell him about the sea. He could bear to hear of it from her—his lassie who had seen it—though he had fought shy of actually hearing what he could never see again himself.

He was so happy in his dwelling on her near return, and the glamour he had clothed it with, that he could smoke there beneath the starlight he could not see, and think of his old nights on ship-board without a pang. Little things came back to him, long forgotten; one particularly, slight enough in itself, but so unlike Tallack Street and the spurious match trade! A wandering ice-floe from the Antarctic Circle, as the ship passed the Falkland Islands; and upon it, clear in the light of a great golden moonrise, a huge white she-bear with one young cub. They were drifting northward—ever northward—to the heat, and the seeming firm ground beneath their feet would melt quicker and quicker each day, to fail them altogether in the end, and leave them to die hard—the strong swimmers—in the deadly warmth of some tropic sea. Jim wondered at the thoughtlessness of his young day of brute courage and heedless energy, and how he never had a thought then for the mother-bear and her despair of saving her child in that plain of immeasurable waters; while now, for some unexplained reason, it was quite a discomfort to him to think of it, there in old Margy's arbour under the clematis. But presently he suspected a reason why he felt a new feeling over it. How if his hold over his child, his precious possession, was melting—melting away! He brushed the intolerable thought aside! Could he not feel for the poor soul on the iceberg, bear though she was, without that? Oh yes!—Lizarann would come to-morrow.

All this trouble, and doctoring, and the like, makes a man raw, thought poor Jim to himself, seeking for apologies for his failure to attain a Spartan ideal. 'Tain't like then-a-days, when you might be in a high sea any hour of the day or night, and be whistled up to take in sail—as he was, to be sure, out of a dream about Dolly, that very time he saw the Flying Dutchman, and lost his sight the week after.... There now!—where was the use of going back on bygones, when Lizarann would be here to-morrow, to hear him tell again about the Dutchman, with all her added knowledge of the sea to help.

But it was true, for all that, that a man got soft with nothing to rouse him up like, and keep him off of nursing up his old grievances, with ne'er a soul nigh to throw a word to. Jim never felt any too sure, neither, that his new cult of music was not an enervating luxury. Undermining musical phrases crept into his practice as a chorister that made him no better—mind you!—than a cry-baby. There was one in particular that was almost cruel to him in its beauty—it was as a matter of fact an adaptation by the Rector of that Ave Maria of Arkadelt that you know as well as we do—and he sang it aloud to the night-wind stirring in the trees, and the owls, for by now night was over all, in a kind of bravado, to show that he could bear it. But his voice broke on the last cadence, do what he might. "There, ye see!—just come of being so lonesome!" Jim spoke aloud to the darkness and the owls, to feel his solitude less if it might be.

But what did it matter when his lassie was coming to-morrow—coming to-morrow!

How the time was passing! There went the cottage clock again the third time since Jim lighted his first pipe after supper. Surely he must be mistaken!—it would stop on the stroke of ten. He counted the deliberate strokes, each with its long preliminary warning; and on the eleventh said to himself that he must have counted wrong. Could he possibly be within an hour of the day that was to bring him Lizarann? Listen for the church-clock of the village, and make sure! He could hear his own heart beating in the stillness, even through the monotone of a cricket somewhere close at hand. Old Margy's clock was a bit fast always....

There!—sure enough this time, the first stroke on the wind. Jim counted steadily to the tenth, and all but made quite certain he had heard the last, so long did the pause seem to his anxiety, when yet another came. No mistake this time. Eleven! Bedtime.

Was it true? One hour more, and he might be asleep, to wake up to the day that would bring him back the thing that was dearer to him than the light no day would ever bring again. Only an hour!

His little dog, sharper of hearing even than he, caught a coming sound afar, and started up in sudden indignation, dog-wise, that something, somewhere, was presuming to exist without consulting him! Whatever it was, Jim thought a restraining finger in his collar a good precautionary measure; with a slight admonition that a smothered growl, for the present, would meet all the needs of the case. It continued to express, under protest, a deep, heart-felt resentment as of a wrong too great to be endured, and still Jim could not spot the cause. At last a motor-horn, somewhere, perhaps, on the far side of the village—two miles away, say!

Loud and faint, by turns, through the village; then clearer on the open road, and then the noise of wheels at great speed. The little dog, probably catching the blinding glare of the lamps, lost all self-control at those two great unheard-of wrongs to his kind, and gave way to his feelings without reserve. Then a rush and a dust-cloud, left to do its worst, at leisure, to the lungs of man and cattle and plants, and a stench to poison the sweet air of heaven. And then a couple of folk had been carried, quicker than need was, from Thanes Castle to Royd Hall, with the execrations of a small population behind them.

Jim was too happy at heart to curse even a motor-car. Besides, he remembered how once this very car had given his little lass a ride. He owed it a benediction rather. He felt his way to his couch, and had got his wooden leg off, and found his pillow, before the reek of petrol had died away, and was asleep almost as soon as the little dog beside him. Was it his last sleep there before he should hear his little lassie's voice again?

The gas was turned down low, almost to extinction, in the ward of the Chalk Cliff Nursing Home, where Adeline Fossett was preparing to pass the night beside her little invalid's bed. There was no other patient in the room. Miss Jane, looking worn and sad, was just saying good-night, with a small hand-lamp in her hand, whose green shade was no help to the pallor of either lady. Both knew what was pending; neither knew how soon.

"Ring if you have the least doubt about it, dear," said Miss Fanshawe. "But my own impression is this will go on a day or two longer. I can't say, but I think if there's a change you'll see it."

"I won't scruple to call you. But I suppose there's nothing to be done that I can't do?"

"Nothing at all. No one can do anything now. Good-night, Adeline!" As she opened the door to go, a muffled clock outside struck midnight. "It's twenty minutes fast," said she, as she closed the door. Then, as Miss Fossett sat in the half-darkness in the large chair by the bedside, she could hear two sounds—the interrupted breathing of the little patient on the bed, and the rapid, irritating ticking of her own watch, laid by chance on something resonant. It would become maddening, she knew, in the growth of the stillness, as the night took its hold upon her; so presently she rose and quenched it. Then, being up, she went to the window, just open for ventilation, and feeling the soft air, warm for late August, opened it gently to its width, and leaned out. The voice of the water was a bare murmur now, away off over half a league of sand; and the wind must have changed, for the bells of a church a mile inland were striking twelve at leisure, and were clear through the silence; till, a railway-yell cutting them off at the tenth stroke, they wavered, lost heart, and died. These were sounds new to the day at Chalk Cliff, bathed for forty-eight hours in a southwest wind, off the sea.

"What did you say, darling?" She closed the window gently, and went back to the bed, to hear.... "Why can't you hear the waves? Is that it? Because the tide's going out. Because it's gone out as far as it can go."

"Can't it go no furver?" asks the voice from the pillow, through a breath that goes heavily.

"Not to-day. Next time it goes out it will—at least, I think so." The speaker was not sure on the point, but she had caught sight of a three-quarter moon, and that would do to quote in case of catechism. She turned on the light slightly, to talk by; then sat by the bed again. But Lizarann's days of scientific inquiry are over. She listens for the sea though, because her Daddy once went sea-voyages, still. "Mustn't I be took to my Daddy in free dyes, by the rilewye?" The sound of the railway-whistle through the window has helped to this.

"Yes, darling; in three or four days you shall go to Daddy. There's a big grape with the skin off for you to suck. Such a big one! Try if you like it."

Lizarann gives her old nod, with the grape in her mouth. She is refusing other diet now, and it was clear two days since that nourishing food and stimulants had been given every chance and failed. She is to be allowed to die in peace, being in good hands.

"I do love you, Teacher, very, very much!"

"So do I, darling.... There are no pips to spit out, because I took them all out. Another?... No?—very well, dear; then I won't bother you.... The counterpane?—it's too heavy? Very well, dear, we'll have it off ... so!"

Which of us, over five-and-twenty, has the luck to be still a stranger to the penultimate restlessness of coming Death—to the hands that will still be weakly seeking for God knows what!—the speech that cannot frame some want its would-be speaker may be helpless to define, but will not give up attempting? Lizarann is nearing that stage fast—faster than Adeline Fossett thought when Miss Jane left her but now.

But her mind is quite clear still on the great main point of her small life. The words "Only Daddy most!" show the continuous current of her thought, coming as they do a long pause after her apostrophe to "Teacher."

"Of course Daddy most, darling child!" says the latter. "But Mr. Yorick very much too!"

The name arouses enthusiasm. "Oh, very, very much too!" But this is too great a tax on the poor little lungs, tubercle-gripped, and an attempt to follow with a schedule of loves deserved and granted fails, and quiet is imperative.

Adeline Fossett turned down the light again, and remained silent, listening to the heavy breathing, with its ugly little spasmodic jerk now and again. She was unhappy in her mind, over and above grief. Here was this little thing with only a few days at most to live—she was convinced of that—and utterly unconscious of her state. Was it right—was it fair—to leave her so? All the traditions of her religious cult from youth upward said no; according to them, the dying were to prepare, or be prepared, for death. But when the patient was simply slipping almost painlessly away—seeming at least to suffer only from an inexplicable feverish unrest, never from acute pain that could not be denied at will—what was to be gained by thrusting on a childish mind a demand to face the black contingency, to make a formal acknowledgment of the grave? Would it not be safe to give one little soul Godspeed into the Unknown, whose only care was now that each of her many loves should be known to their recipients, each in its right degree? Would not those very loves be as garments to shelter the new-born soul in the world beyond, whether the date of its arrival was now or hereafter? She was shocked at the venturesome impiety of the question she half-asked herself:—Could she not trust God for that? A happy inspiration hinted at a half-answer in the affirmative, and biassed her to silence.

Another anxiety, perhaps more pressing still, took the place of that one. Ought she not to have written more explicitly to the Rectory about the child's state? On her arrival, in answer to Miss Fanshawe's telegram, she had found nothing to warrant prediction of the days, or even weeks, that the tension might be prolonged. All she could say with certainty was that Lizarann was at present quite unfit to be moved, but that it was impossible to foresee. We must wait on events. But she said never a word to set any hopes afoot. She had written almost daily; once in answer to a letter of Athelstan Taylor, telling how he might have to go away for a few days, and of his resolution of silence with respect to Jim. She was, at first, inclined to disapprove this course, but later saw that it was unavoidable, and wrote to that effect. Still, the idea of Jim in ignorance, nourishing hopes, perhaps, while his little lass lay there dying, was an excruciating one. She said to herself repeatedly that it was merely an idea; that the co-temporaneousness of a death with far greater unconsciousness of its possibility than Jim's was an everyday occurrence. What would the wife, who now hears of her husband's death months ago, have gained by the knowledge of her widowhood, had the news come sooner? She pictured other instances to persuade the idea away. But it remained.

Miss Fanshawe, to whom this case was only one of a hundred, said to her, "If you could spirit the child's father down here to be with her when she dies, that would be another matter. But you say that's impossible. Why give him ups and downs of anxiety? Tell him what you like by way of preparation, but not till it's all over." Miss Fossett felt the truth of this view, but the position grated on her moral sense. However, she felt she must submit to the discomfort of a sense of untruth for awhile. It was not to last long.

She must have been dozing, and for longer than she could have believed possible, when she waked suddenly to reply to the child, who had spoken, with, "Yes—darling! What did you say?"

"Aren't you going to bed, Teacher?"

"Yes, dear, presently."

"'Tin't night?"

"Yes, it's night. But that doesn't matter. I shall go to bed presently."

"When shall you go to bed?" After a pause, this.

"Presently, when Miss Jane comes. She'll come very soon." Then, in response to something only audible to close listening, "No, darling, you're not to have the nasty medicine—only the nice one. It's not time yet for either.... Why mustn't you have no medicine?... Well, darling, you know we all have to take medicine when the doctor says so...."

"Did the doctor said I was ill?"

"Yes, dear, the doctor said you were ill, and to stop in bed till you were quite well ... what?"

"And then go home to my Daddy where Mrs. Forks is?"

"And then go home to your Daddy where Mrs. Fox is." A phase of coughing comes upon this; alleviation is tried for with the nice medicine. But stimulants and sedatives have had their day in this case. Adeline Fossett is becoming alive to the fact. However, the nice medicine can still soothe a little; and in half an hour a lull comes, and a kind of sleep.

Then for the watcher another deadly doze, of jerks and nightmares. And then another waking to the sound of the little patient's voice, curiously full of life this time.

"When I'm took home to my Daddy, Teacher, where Mrs. Forks is...."

"Yes, dear!"

"Shall the children go on digging and spaddle in the water, just the same like now?"

"Yes, darling, just the same, till it's too cold. Then they'll go home and go to school."

"And fish for sprawns just the same?"

"Just the same."

"And when they've gone to school and no one's on the beach to see, will there be high water?"

"High water? Yes, of course, dear—every day, just the same as now ... what?"

"And low water?"

"And low water too."

"Like when my Daddy went sea-viyages?" "Like when your Daddy went sea-voyages." But this has been a long talk, and has gone slowly against obstacles of speech. So when Lizarann ends with a half-inaudible, "I sould tell my Daddy that," the torpor is returning, and it may be she really sleeps, for all that the breathing is so difficult. She has persisted that she suffers no pain; so Miss Fossett tries for satisfaction on that score. But the fear is that having no pain may only mean that the pain eludes description. Still, there is room for hope, of a sort.

"I've heard many cases talk like that, quite brightly, just before," says Miss Jane, standing by the bed. She has come to relieve guard, and has heard her friend's report of her night's watching. Lizarann has not moved since she spoke last, an hour ago, and still lies in what may be sleep, breathing heavily. The jerks in the breathing do not wake her, strangely.

"She was almost chattering, one time," says Miss Fossett. "Poor little darling!"

"About her Daddy?"

"Yes, and about the high and low tides, and how he went sea-voyages."

"Fancy that! The little soul! But no delirium?"

"I think none. Just a little feverishness—in the half-waking. Not delirium."

"You go to bed now. I'll call you if there is anything."

"Promise to!" A nod satisfies the speaker, who goes away to lie down. As she looks out, from a window on her way, across a sea without a ripple, she understands why the tide was unheard. Even now, scarcely a sound! She pauses a little to look at the planet blazing above the offing, and its long path of light upon the water—wonders is it Venus or Jupiter?—and passes on to rest. How callous is the bed one lies down on in one's clothes, with something over one, to get a few hours' sleep! And how hard they are to get, sometimes!

Adeline Fossett had had over three hours when she waked with a start in response to a hand on her shoulder. "I should like you to come," said Miss Jane, who then returned at once.

Lizarann, or the shadow that had been she, was propped up with pillows on the bed when Miss Fossett followed her friend two minutes later. "Is that Teacher?" was what she seemed to say. But speech was very faint indeed.

"I don't think she sees you," said Miss Jane. "Can you hear what I say, darling?" Yes, apparently; and knows it is Teacher who speaks. What is it we can get for her? For the feverish movement of the hands, and the constant effort to articulate, have all the usual effect of baffled speech, with much to say.

Miss Fanshawe's wider hospital experience makes her less receptive of the idea. She waited, silent, while Miss Fossett asked the question more than once, before any intelligible answer came.

Then speech came suddenly to Lizarann. She wanted to get up now, and go to her Daddy. Yes!—she sould like to have her new flock on and go to her Daddy. Mustn't she go, Teacher? To which Teacher replied: "Yes, darling, you shall go, very soon. But it's night now, and Daddy's in bed."

"But I shall go?"

"Yes—indeed you shall! Very soon." Then Miss Fossett looked up at Miss Jane, who merely said, "Not very long now." But how strong the voice was for a moment! Yes—that would be so sometimes—sometimes even louder than that. Wasn't she speaking now?

Miss Fossett stooped to listen again. "I shall see my Daddy," is all she hears. Yes—Lizarann shall see her Daddy—it's a promise! What is that she's saying now? Be quiet and listen!

"When I see my Daddy—when I see my Daddy...."

"Yes—darling! What?"

"When I see my Daddy I shall call out, 'Poy-lot!'"