"When did Louis go into town?"

"Several days ago. He has a way of disappearing suddenly, not giving the family an idea of where he is going or when he expects to return, and when he does get back he shows to any one who is not blind, that he has been pretty low down."

"They expect him back to-morrow?"

"Why, as to that, they have been expecting him ever since he went away. I heard Miss Alice say that he went unexpectedly, leaving word that he should probably be back to dinner."

"Harry, my boy, I am almost inclined to think that I ought to start out to-night, and try to look him up."

"To-night! Why, Uncle Harold, how could you? It would be midnight and after before you could reach the city, and then where would you go? The addresses that Miss Alice can give you must be respectable places, with closed doors to-night."

"That is true," Mr. Chessney answered, after a thoughtful pause; "it would be a wild kind of proceeding, apparently, with very little excuse; and yet I am someway impressed that it is the thing to do."

Alas for the Christian world which believes in theory, that there is a direct link between the seen and the unseen, by which the earnest soul can be told in what way to walk, and, in practice, thinks it must search out its own way! Mr. Chessney did not go out in search of his friend. He did not even ask his Master whether it was his will that the apparently "wild proceeding" should be attempted. He prayed, it is true; and he prayed for Louis Ansted, but only in a general way; and he retired to rest, saying within himself that directly after breakfast he would go into town and see what he could do.

Before he was awake the next morning, the piazza of the little country hotel, where he stopped, was filled with loungers who had something unusual and exciting to talk about. There were a dozen different stories, it is true; but out of them all the interested listener could glean certain things which were painfully likely to be facts. There had been a runaway—to that all parties agreed; and Louis Ansted had been in the carriage, and had been thrown; but whether he was killed, or only seriously hurt, or whether the horse had taken fright at the approaching train, or whether the driver had attempted to cross the railroad-track in the face of the train, or whether there had been any train at all, authorities differed. It was still early when Harry Matthews knocked at his uncle's door with the confused particles of story.

"And you don't know whether he is living, or not?" asked the startled uncle who was now making his toilet with all possible speed.

"No, I can't find out. Some of them say he was killed instantly, and others have it that he was only stunned, and has revived. It may be nothing but a scare. South Plains has so little excitement that it is apt to make as much as it can out of everything. Uncle Harold, I can't go up there and find out, for my train will be due in five minutes, and I must be at the telegraph office, you know."

"Yes; I will be down in less than five minutes, and will go immediately up there. I hope it is chiefly talk." Yet when he was left alone, he said aloud and mournfully: "If I had only followed my impressions last night!"

He had occasion to say it, or, at least, to think it often, in the days which followed. South Plains had not exaggerated, this time. Louis Ansted was not dead—at least, the heart was beating; but he lay a bruised, unconscious heap among the snowy draperies of his bed—his soiled and matted clothing, which as yet they had not dared remove, telling to the practiced eye a story of more than a mere runaway. The skillful doctor, who had already been summoned from the city, was silent as well as skillful. He issued his orders in as few words as possible, and kept his own counsel, until, left alone with Mr. Chessney for a moment, in answer to the question, "What does this stupor mean?" he shook his head.

"Hard to tell. It was on him before the accident, if that gives you any light."

It gave him bitter light, and made him groan in spirit over the fact that he had been tempted to go out in the night and hunt for his friend, and had not gone.

Later in the day, bits of the facts came to him. Louis Ansted had been alone; had hired a horse at the livery and started for home. "More under the influence of liquor than usual, perhaps," the reluctant hostler at the livery had admitted, "still, I thought he would get through all right." For the rest, the silent lips on the bed told no tales. He had been found, not very far from the railroad crossing, lying under a tree, and the horse had made his way back to the stables. Whether a train had frightened the animal, or whether being left to himself while the driver sank into a drunken sleep had caused his alarm, or how the accident had occurred, was left to conjecture.

His mother continually repeated the story—and succeeded in making herself believe it—that a vicious horse had been given him, who evidently became unmanageable at the sound of the locomotive; but some of the listeners went out and said that there was no train passing between the hours that the horse left the stables and returned there, and the doctor shrugged his shoulders and said nothing.

Then followed one of those periods of waiting and watching which some people know all about; the miseries of which can only be understood by having to live them. The trip to the Rocky Mountains was indefinitely postponed, and Harold Chessney, having made a journey to the city, and rearranged his business, returned to take his place among the watchers.

He was fully roused now; so were all the friends of the sufferer; his body was in danger. It was not at all difficult to make his mother understand this, and no means were left untried by which the frail shell might possibly be rescued from impending ruin.

In this way passed weeks, while the soul of the injured man hovered on the edge of another world. Gradually the excitement in the village calmed down, and everywhere outside of that house on the hill every-day life went on again. Mr. Chessney came and went, keeping a hand on his business interests where he must, but keeping the most of his thoughts and the most of his time waiting, in the hope that consciousness would return once more to the wreck on the bed. There was one other who watched and waited, too, though she could not now go to the house to inquire. She could pray; and this she did. Sometimes it seemed to her that every thought was a prayer for that periled soul. And often and often she, too, had to think:

"What if I had been more anxious, and earnest, and constant, while the body was comparatively in health—might not things possibly have been different?"

It was in the middle of the night, and Mr. Chessney sat alone with the sick man. There was nothing to do but wait, and he had prevailed upon other weary watchers to rest, and let him take his turn. So there was only himself to be startled by a low voice from one who had been for so many weeks speechless: "Harold, is it you?"

Great was the rejoicing in the troubled home the next morning. Louis was awake and conscious, knew them all, smiled feebly on his mother, and watched hungrily every movement of Mr. Chessney.

The worst was over; he would gain rapidly now. So the mother said, with eager voice and joyful eyes. Alice looked up questioningly when Mr. Chessney remained silent and grave, and as soon as opportunity came, asked her anxious question:

"Mr. Chessney, I can see that you do not share mamma's joy. Do you think the indications unfavorable?"

"I don't know, Miss Ansted. I am not a physician, only a nurse, and I hope I may be mistaken; but it is true that I am anxious."

And the doctor, when he came, expressed no surprise and no pleasure over the change.

"But then he is so utterly unimpressible!" said the mother, "one might almost as well have a marble statue for a physician."

Yet the statue worked faithfully and tirelessly, and, it must be confessed, hopelessly. To Mr. Chessney he would talk occasionally; and there came a day when that gentleman followed him out to the lawn.

"Doctor, what do you think?"

"That it is a charming morning."

"Doctor, is our patient gaining?"

"No."

"Is there hope that he will in time?"

"No."

"Do you mean that you have no hope of his recovery?"

"None at all; have not had from the first. Brains like his never recover from such treatment as they have received."

"But, doctor, this is very sudden. Do you mean he will lie there helpless for the rest of his life?"

"I don't think he will lie there three weeks longer, but he may; we are not infallible. I shall have to hasten this morning. Young Marshall came home in a drunken rage last night, and kicked his wife, and she is going to die, I think. I don't know what we doctors would do if this were not a free country, and liquor-sellers had not a right to kill by inches all the people they choose. This victim over whom you are watching is only one of many. That ought to comfort the friends, ought it not? Good-morning."

"I haven't told them," said Mr. Chessney, two hours later, speaking to Claire. He had come out to get a breath of the sweet morning air, and to give Claire the news. During the weeks past, he had been very thoughtful of her anxiety, and very careful that she should receive daily bulletins. "I have not told them, but I must. Miss Benedict, this is the hardest task a man ever has to do. How can I tell that mother that she has robbed herself of her son? She has steadily thwarted for two years every scheme that I devised to help him; and she did not know what she was about, either, poor mother!"

"Did you ever try to tell her?"

"Yes, and failed, as you did. Alice told me of your effort. But I ought to have tried again. I knew she was deceived. She thought me a fanatic, and I could have told her of scenes that would have made one of her. I shrank from it."

It was more than two weeks before she saw him again. During this time she twice received little twisted slips of paper, brought to her by the faithful Bud, and on them would be written a request that she would pray for a soul in peril. One long letter, blistered with tears, Alice wrote to her; the burden of it being the same; and this was all she knew of what was passing in the house on the hill. She had not entered it since that day when its mistress turned from her. Not that she would not quickly have done so, had occasion arisen, but there seemed no need to force herself on the poor mother.

"I shall never see him again," she told herself, sorrowfully, "and I have seen him so many times when I might have tried to help him, and did not!"

Then there came one brief, never-to-be-forgotten note, written hurriedly by Mr. Chessney:

"I believe that Louis rests in the Everlasting Arms."

One Saturday morning she was summoned to the parlor to see Mr. Chessney. He came forward quickly, with an anxious air, as of one having a request to make which he feared might not be granted.

"I have come for you," he said. "Louis wants to see you. I have been charged to bring you back with me, if possible. I wish I could save you from this ordeal. Do you shrink from it very much?"

"No," she said with quiet gravity. "Only as one shrinks from seeing errors that one is powerless to help. Why am I wanted, Mr. Chessney? What can I do!"

"I do not know. Louis wants you. He wishes to see you and his mother and his sister Alice together, and I shall have to add that he wants me to be present. I tried to spare you all this last, but he grew excited over it."

"I would quite as soon have you present," Claire said, with gentle wonder. She did not understand why it was supposed to be a time of special trial to her individually. If she could have heard Mrs. Ansted's voice in confidential talk with Mr. Chessney, she would have been enlightened.

"The girl is well enough, Mr. Chessney, and she has been of help to some of the lower classes here during the winter. I have nothing against her; on the contrary, I would like to shield her. The simple fact is that she has become too deeply interested in my son. It is not strange, I am sure, but it is sad; and that is why I do not wish Alice to have her here at this time. As a mother, it is my duty to shield the girl, though I must say she showed very little consideration for a mother's feelings when she talked with me." All this, and much more, which Mr. Chessney weighed, putting his nephew's views beside them, and came to the conclusion that there was an attachment between the two young people which had not been smiled upon by their elders.

Although Claire knew nothing of this, her appearance in the sick-room was attended with sufficient embarrassment. Mrs. Ansted received her with a sort of grave tolerance, as one who was humoring the whim of a sick man, and doing violence to her own sense of propriety thereby. But the change in Louis Ansted was so great, that, after the first moment, it held Claire's thoughts, to the exclusion of all trivial things.

He held toward her a thin and trembling hand, as he said:

"It was good in you to come. I have changed a great deal since that night you refused to ride with me, haven't I? Yes, I have changed since then. Has Harold told you that I have found help at last?"

"He has told me wonderful and blessed news of you," Claire said, taking the chair that Mr. Chessney brought to the bedside. "I do not need to tell you how glad I was to hear it."

"No, you don't; that is true. You have given ample proof that nothing which could happen to a friend of yours could rejoice you more. I wish I had met you earlier; it would have made a difference, a great difference in my life. I did not know that religion meant much of anything. Harold, here, was of your mind, but he seemed exceptional—a kind of fanatic; I could not keep within sight of him. The other people whom I knew intimately, seemed to have very little to do with their religion. I beg your pardon, mother, but that was the way it seemed to me. There are different degrees, I suppose."

"Louis, you are talking too much," here interposed Mr. Chessney, as he brought the medicine to administer; "your pulse is rising."

"Never mind, it won't hurt me. It is almost over now; you know that, Chessney, as well as I do. And I have something to say, that for the good of all parties concerned, must be said now. Mother, I want you to know one thing: from words which you let fall yesterday, I have discovered that you have a mistaken idea about one matter. I am going to die, and I am glad of it. I have gone so far down hill, that to climb back again, for one so awfully bruised as I am, would be hard, very hard; perhaps the Lord sees that it would be impossible, and so gives me this easy way. But, mother, before I go, I want to tell you something which will remove from your mind a false impression. I saw my danger some time ago, and struggled for a way of escape. It was a weak way that I chose; God would not let me build on it. I fancied that if I could have Claire Benedict for my wife, I could be a good and true man. I implored her to help me in this way, and she utterly and hopelessly refused.

"You know why I am telling you this, but she does not, and I ask her to forgive me."