to be fully accomplished,
and there were no fresh cases.

People began to go about their business as of old. Those who had fled
returned to their homes, and strove to take up the scattered threads of
life as best they might. In many cases whole families had been swept out
of existence; in others (more truly melancholy cases), one member had
escaped when all the rest had perished. The religious houses were
crowded with the helpless orphans of the sufferers in the epidemic, and
the summer crops lay rotting in the fields for want of labourers to get
them in.

John's house in Guildford had by this time reassumed its normal aspect.
The last of the sick who had not been carried to the grave, but had
recovered to return home, had now departed, with many a blessing upon
the master, whose act of piety and charity had doubtless saved so many
lives at this crisis. The work the young man had set himself to do had
been nobly accomplished; but the task had been one beyond his feeble
strength, and he now lay upon a couch of sickness, knowing well, if
others did not, that his days were numbered.

He had fallen down in a faint upon the very day that the last patient
had been able to leave his doors. For a moment it was feared that the
poison of the distemper had fastened upon him; but it was not so. The
attack was but due to the failure of the heart's action -- nature, tried
beyond her powers of endurance, asserting herself at last -- and they
laid him down in his old favourite haunt, with his books around him,
having made the place look like it did before the house had been turned
into a veritable hospital and mortuary.

When John opened his eyes at last it was to find Joan bending over him;
and looking into her face with his sweet, tired smile, he said:

"You will not leave me, Joan?"

"No," she answered gently; "I will not leave you yet. Bridget and I will
nurse you. All our other helpers are themselves worn out; but we have
worked only a little while. We have not borne the burden and heat of
that terrible day."

"You came in a good hour -- like angels of mercy that you were," said
John, feeling, now that the long strain and struggle was over, a
wonderful sense of rest and peace. "I thought it was a dream when first
I saw your face, Joan -- when I saw you moving about amongst the sick,
always with a child in your arms. I have never been able to ask how you
came hither. In those days we could never stay to talk. There are many