gentle face under the nurse's cap shone with
appreciation and admiration as she smiled her sympathy and understanding.

"My son--my son--will come--to-day." The voice was stronger, and, with the
eyes, expressed a conviction--a certainty--with the faintest shadow of a
question.

The nurse looked at her watch. "The boat was due in New York, early this
morning, madam."

A step sounded in the hall outside. The nurse started, and turned quickly
toward the door. But the woman said, "The doctor." And, again, the fire
that burned in those sunken eyes was hidden wearily under their dark lids.

The white-haired physician and the nurse, at the farther end of the room,
spoke together in low tones. Said the physician,--incredulous,--"You say
there is no change?"

"None that I can detect," breathed the nurse. "It is wonderful!"

"Her mind is clear?"

"As though she were in perfect health."

The doctor took the nurse's chart. For a moment, he studied it in silence.
He gave it back with a gesture of amazement. "God! nurse," he whispered,
"she should be in her grave by now! It's a miracle! But she has always
been like that--" he continued, half to himself, looking with troubled
admiration toward the bed at the other end of the room--"always."

He went slowly forward to the chair that the nurse placed for him. Seating
himself quietly beside his patient, and bending forward with intense
interest, his fine old head bowed, he regarded with more than professional
care the wasted face upon the pillow.

The doctor remembered, too well, when those finely moulded features--now,
so worn by sorrow, so marked by sickness, so ghastly in the hue of
death--were rounded with young-woman health and tinted with rare
loveliness. He recalled that day when he saw her a bride. He remembered
the sweet, proud dignity of her young wifehood. He saw her, again, when
her face shone with the glad triumph and the holy joy of motherhood.

The old physician turned from his patient, to look with sorrowful eyes
about the room that was to witness the end.

Why was such a woman dying like this? Why was a life of such rich mental
and spiritual endowments--of such wealth of true culture--coming to its
close in such material poverty?

The doctor was one of the few who knew. He was one of the few who
understood that, to the woman herself, it was necessary.

There were those who--without understanding, for the sake of the years
that were gone--would have surro