that this was the right
thing to do, and the new thoughts and longings became more brave and
healthy for the effort. The crisis came on Saturday; the day week that
Thompson had died; and during that long afternoon Tom sat in his study
reading his Bible, and going every half-hour to the housekeeper's room,
expecting each time to hear that the gentle and brave little spirit
had gone home. But God had work for Arthur to do. The crisis passed:
on Sunday evening he was declared out of danger; on Monday he sent a
message to Tom that he was almost well, had changed his room, and was to
be allowed to see him the next day.

It was evening when the housekeeper summoned him to the sick-room.
Arthur was lying on the sofa by the open window, through which the rays
of the western sun stole gently, lighting up his white face and golden
hair. Tom remembered a German picture of an angel which he knew; often
had he thought how transparent and golden and spirit-like it was; and
he shuddered, to think how like it Arthur looked, and felt a shock as if
his blood had all stopped short, as he realized how near the other world
his friend must have been to look like that. Never till that moment had
he felt how his little chum had twined himself round his heart-strings,
and as he stole gently across the room and knelt down, and put his arm
round Arthur's head on the pillow, felt ashamed and half-angry at his
own red and brown face, and the bounding sense of health and power which
filled every fibre of his body, and made every movement of mere living a
joy to him. He needn't have troubled himself: it was this very strength
and power so different from his own which drew Arthur so to him.

Arthur laid his thin, white hand, on which the blue veins stood out so
plainly, on Tom's great brown fist, and smiled at him; and then looked
out of the window again, as if he couldn't bear to lose a moment of the
sunset, into the tops of the great feathery elms, round which the rooks
were circling and clanging, returning in flocks from their evening's
foraging parties. The elms rustled, the sparrows in the ivy just outside
the window chirped and fluttered about, quarrelling, and making it up
again; the rooks, young and old, talked in chorus, and the merry shouts
of the boys and the sweet click of the cricket-bats came up cheerily
from below.

"Dear George," said Tom, "I am so glad to be let up to see you at last.
I've tried hard to come so often, but they woul