mile steal
over the wan face.

"Is that Anthony? I cannot see. God bless thee, my son! He is
giving me all I could ask or wish."

Dr. Langton signed to his daughters to come away. The patient had
no strength for further greetings then. Freda's eyes were blind
with tears as she found herself hurrying from the room, and
Magdalen threw herself into her husband's arms, weeping aloud in
the fulness of her heart. He held her closely to him; he too was
deeply moved.

"But we must not grieve for him, my beloved; as he himself has said
so many times during these days, 'To depart, and to be with Christ,
is far better.' He goes forth so joyfully into the great unseen
that we must not seek too much to hold him back. His Lord may have
need of him elsewhere. In truth, he is more fit for heaven than
earth."

"He dies a martyr, if any ever did!" spoke Freda, choking back her
tears, and speaking with shining eyes. "He has laid down his life
for a testimony to the truth. What martyr can do more than that?"

"Is there no hope of his life?" asked Magdalen, still clinging to
her husband's arm.

"Your father fears not," answered Arthur; "and in sooth, after
hearing the story of their imprisonment, I think the same myself.
Oh, the patience, the sweetness, the self forgetfulness, with which
he has borne all! One could weep tears of blood to think that such
things are done to living saints on earth in the name of religion."

They looked breathlessly at Arthur, and he spoke again.

"I will not describe to you what we found when we entered the
prison. Enough that one would not herd one's swine in such a place.
Two out of the three were dying; and the third, though sick as you
now see him, was yet dragging himself from one to the other, to
minister to their still greater needs, as he had done from the
first, giving to them of his own meagre food and water--neither of
which was fit for human beings to touch--and enduring all the slow
agonies of fevered thirst day after day, that their in some way be
lightened.

"Sumner lived to tell us that. From the first Radley had sickened,
as the strong men ofttimes do in such places more quickly than the
weaker and feebler of body. Clarke, who had brought his body into
subjection by fasting, who had nursed the sick in their filthy
homes, and spent weeks at times in fever-stricken spots--he
resisted longest the ravages of the fell prison fever. He and
Sumner nursed Radley as best they might. Then