"IN HIS HEART CONSENTING TO A PRAYER GONE BY."

—Hemans.

—Moore.

Sitting at her window watching the radiant day hiding its blushes on the breast of night, Lulu Clendenon's heart was full of a strange, aching pain. She had, as Captain Fontenay had told Winans, removed to the hotel where Mrs. Conway had taken rooms, to remain until Mrs. Winans recovered from her attack of impending brain fever.

As yet she had not seen Mrs. Winans, no one being permitted to enter the sick-room excepting those who were in close attendance on the patient; and, truth to tell, Lulu was lonely. She missed Bruce Conway. For many weeks now the twilight hour had been the pleasantest of the day to her, for it had been passed in his company. Now as she sat at the window, cuddled up in a great easy-chair, her cheek pressed down in the hollow of her little white hand, her wistful brown eyes watching the fairy hues of sunset, Lulu was waking to a realization of her own heart.

The little sister that Captain Clendenon had wanted to keep a child forever was a child no longer. Love—the old, old story, old as the world, and yet new and sweet as the blushing flowers of to-day's blossoming—had opened for her the portals of a broader existence, and Lulu was learning the strength and depth of her woman's heart first by its intense aching.

According to the verdict of the world, it is a woman's shame to love unsought; and yet I think that that is scarcely love which waits to be given leave to love. Flowers blossom of their own sweet will, and often as not their sweetest perfume rises under the heedless feet that trample them down. It is much so with the human heart. It gives love, not where it is asked always, but often where it is uncared for and unknown; and the cold steel of disappointment is but to such love as the knife that digs round the roots of our flowers—it makes the fibers strike deeper in the soil of the heart.

Lulu wished idly that she were floating in ether on the top of that gold-tinged cloud that rose in the far west, wave on wave, over masses of violet, rose, and crimson; or that she might have laid her hot cheek against that white drift that looked like a chilly bank of snow, and cooled the fever that sent its warm flushes over her face.

The pretty lip trembled a little, and Lulu felt as if she wanted to go home, like a tired and weary child, to her mother.

Mrs. Conway's light footsteps, as she entered softly, startled her from her painful reverie. She roused up into a more dignified posture, and inquired touching the state of the young patient.

"She has been delirious to-day, but is now for the time being quite rational, though still and silent. I want to take you to see her, my dear. You will have to help nurse her (we cannot leave her solely to the care of that nurse and the doctor—it would be cruel), and it is better to have her get acquainted with you now, and accustomed to seeing you about her room. You can come now, if you please, dear. I have spoken to her of you, and she will be prepared to see you."

Lulu rose from her easy-chair, shook out her tumbled skirts, trying to shake off a portion of her heart's heaviness at the same time, and smoothing her dark braids a little, followed her friend.

But her heart rose to her throat as they crossed the threshold of the sick-room, and stood in the presence of a woman who had always been such an object of interest to her.

The fading winter sunshine glimmered into the apartment and shone on Norah, where she sat, grave and anxious-looking, at the side of the low French bed, whose sweeping canopy of lace thrown back over the top revealed the form of Grace Winans lying under the silken coverlet, like some rare picture, her cheeks flushed scarlet with fever, the white lids drooping over her brilliant eyes, her arms thrown back over her head, her small hands twisted in the bright drift of golden hair that swept back over the embroidered pillow.

"Dear Grace," Mrs. Conway said, softly, "this is my young friend, Lulu, Mrs. Winans, Miss Clendenon."

Slowly the sweeping lashes lifted, and the melancholy gaze dwelt on Lulu's face, but the lips that opened to speak only trembled and shut again in that set, firm line with which proud women keep back a sob. One little hand came down from over her head, and was softly laid in Lulu's own. As it lay there, warm, feverish, fluttering like a wounded bird, the young girl's heart swelled with a throb of passionate sympathy.

She bent impulsively and pressed her cool, dewy lips on the fevered brow of the other, while she registered a vow in her unselfish soul, that she would stand between Grace Winans and every sorrow that effort or sacrifice of hers could avert.

How potent is the spell of sympathy! The light pressure of those soft lips touched a chord in Grace's tortured heart that never in after years ceased to vibrate. Her husband had spoken truly in saying that she had no intimate woman-friend, but it was scarcely her fault. Her nature was a singularly pure and elevated one; the majority of the women she knew had few feelings in common with her, and she was too much superior to them not to be an object of envy rather than a congenial friend to most. She had found a kindred spirit at last in the sister of Willard Clendenon; and if the shifting current of fate had ordered her life otherwise than what it was—had she married Willard Clendenon, maimed, comparatively poor, unskilled in the current coin of worldly compliment though he was, she would have found her soul-mate. But these strange mistakes lie scattered all along the path of life, and it is true that matches, if made in heaven, sometimes get woefully mismatched coming down.

"Her fever is getting higher," Mrs. Conway said, as she anxiously fingered the blue-veined wrist.

It rose higher and higher; delirium set in, and in restless visions the young mother babbled of her lost child; she was seeking him—seeking him everywhere, through the wide, thronged avenues of Washington, the long corridors of the capitol, the dull, narrow streets of Norfolk, by the moonlit shores of Ocean View; and the red light of a meteor in the sky was blinding her so that she could not see; and when it faded she was in darkness—and now burning reproaches scorched the sweet lips with their fiery breath, and Paul Winans' name was whispered, but with inexpressible bitterness. The impression on her mind, strengthened by his words at their last interview, was that he had intentionally secreted her baby to punish her in some sort for what seemed to him faults in her. He had struck a blow at her heart where it was most vulnerable; she had told him it would be her death, and he had wanted her to die; and this dismal refrain haunted her fevered slumbers through long hours. In vain Norah cooled the burning head with linen strips, holding masses of powdered ice; the white arms tossed restlessly, the lips still babbled incoherent grief and anger; the physician came, watched her for an hour, went through the formula of prescribing, and shaking his head and promising to see her in the morning, went his way; and the hours went on—it was ten o'clock, and quieter slumbers seemed to fall upon the worn-out patient; she talked less incoherently, tossed and moaned less often.

"A gentleman to see Mrs. Conway," was announced by the subdued voice of a servant at the door.

Supposing that it was her nephew, she glided softly out, returning in ten minutes, to find Grace feebly tossing again and staring with wide-open eyes at every object in the dimly lighted room. She bent over her and tried to fix her wavering attention.

"My dear, will you see your husband? Senator Winans desires an interview with you."

Something in the name seemed to fix and hold her wandering thoughts. She half-lifted herself, resting on her elbow and sweeping her hand across her brow.

"My husband—did you say that?"

"Yes; listen, dear. He has come to see you, and is waiting in the parlor. May I bring him in? Will you see him?"

A flash of hope in the fever-bright violet eyes, a hopeful ring in the trembling voice:

"The baby—he has brought the baby?"

"No, not yet; he hopes to soon," taking the small hands and softly caressing them with hers, "indeed, you are mistaken, Gracie, in thinking, dear child, that he is deceiving you in this matter. He is in great distress, longs to tell you so, and to try to comfort you; say that you will see him."

"No, not I; you do not know him—he is so cruel. Oh, my poor heart!" clasping her hands across her heaving breast, "He has come to triumph in my anguish, to laugh at the wreck he has made of my life."

"Not so, Gracie, dear little one, he has come to sympathize with you—won't you let him come?"

"No, no, never!" rising straight up and shaking herself free of Mrs. Conway's detaining hand, the delirium clouding her brain again. "Oh, never till he comes to me with our baby in his arms will I look upon his face again. Tell him this, and say that if he entered that door I would most surely spring from that window rather than look on his face with its smile of triumph at my suffering."

She fell back, exhausted and quite delirious now, and Mrs. Conway turned with a heavy heart to carry the ill tidings to the man who waited in the next room. She was spared that pain. The clear, bell-like voice, sharpened by anger and scorn that was strange to that gentle spirit, had penetrated the next room, and he knew his doom and felt it to be just, as he stood in the middle of the floor, his hands clasped behind him, his head bowed on his breast, a perfect picture of humiliation and despair.

"I have heard," he said, with a ghastly smile, as her fingers touched his arm.

"My poor boy!" she said.

"It is just," he said, in a whisper of intense pain. "God knows I merit worse at her hands, but, all the same, it goes hard with me—the worse because, as I told you just now, I leave for Europe to-morrow in quest of our child. Oh! Mrs. Conway, take care of her while I am gone. Don't—don't let her die!"

"She shall not die," said Lulu's soft, low tones, as she glided into the room and up to his side. "I will—we all will—do everything to keep her for you until you come back to make her happiness your chief care in life hereafter. She must not, will not, die!"

He looked up, caught her hand, and touched it gratefully to his lips.

"God bless you for those words, Miss Clendenon! You always come with renewed life and promises of hope. Oh! watch over her well, I entreat you; and, oh! teach her, if you can, to think less harshly of me. May God forgive me for my folly and wickedness to her, and give me a chance to retrieve the past by the future."

The two ladies looked at each other, deeply moved.

"I am coming back at the very earliest possible day after I recover my child," he went on; "but never till then. I have heard my doom from her own lips." Then he stopped, too deeply pained for words, and with only a heart-wrung "good-by," was gone.

"The next time you will seek me," she had said, at their last fatal interview.

There are many thoughtless words spoken that afterward seem like prophecies.

Mrs. Conway and Lulu went back to the room where they were doomed to watch for many long weeks yet to come over the sick-bed where life and death were waging fierce warfare over a life-weary, reckless victim. But the "balance so fearfully and darkly hung" that a touch may turn the scale toward "that bourne whence no traveler returns," wavered, and dropped its pale burden back into the arms of those who loved her; and, shadowy, wasted, and hopeless, Grace Winans took up the cross of her life again, with all the sunshine gone out of it, the only comfort left to her bruised heart that "comfort scorned of devils"—that comfort that is "sorrow's crown"—"remembering happier things."