en quite unconscious of any one's
sitting by him then. I got the Major to say that we were not going away
at present and that I would come back to-morrow and watch a bit by the
bedside. But I got him to add--and I shook my head hard to make it
stronger--"We agree that we never saw this face before."

Our boy was greatly surprised when we told him sitting out in the balcony
in the starlight, and he ran over some of those stories of former
Lodgers, of the Major's putting down, and asked wasn't it possible that
it might be this lodger or that lodger. It was not possible, and we went
to bed.

In the morning just at breakfast-time the military character came
jingling round, and said that the doctor thought from the signs he saw
there might be some rally before the end. So I says to the Major and
Jemmy, "You two boys go and enjoy yourselves, and I'll take my Prayer
Book and go sit by the bed." So I went, and I sat there some hours,
reading a prayer for him poor soul now and then, and it was quite on in
the day when he moved his hand.

He had been so still, that the moment he moved I knew of it, and I pulled
off my spectacles and laid down my book and rose and looked at him. From
moving one hand he began to move both, and then his action was the action
of a person groping in the dark. Long after his eyes had opened, there
was a film over them and he still felt for his way out into light. But
by slow degrees his sight cleared and his hands stopped. He saw the
ceiling, he saw the wall, he saw me. As his sight cleared, mine cleared
too, and when at last we looked in one another's faces, I started back,
and I cries passionately:

"O you wicked wicked man! Your sin has found you out!"

For I knew him, the moment life looked out of his eyes, to be Mr. Edson,
Jemmy's father who had so cruelly deserted Jemmy's young unmarried mother
who had died in my arms, poor tender creetur, and left Jemmy to me.

"You cruel wicked man! You bad black traitor!"

With the little strength he had, he made an attempt to turn over on his
wretched face to hide it. His arm dropped out of the bed and his head
with it, and there he lay before me crushed in body and in mind. Surely
the miserablest sight under the summer sun!

"O blessed Heaven," I says a crying, "teach me what to say to this broken
mortal! I am a poor sinful creetur, and the Judgment is not mine."

As I lifted my eyes up to the clear bright sky, I saw the high tower
w