aded away, and there came
to him a positive knowledge that he was on a sick-bed, where unless
something could be done for him he should be dead in an hour. Then a
spoon touched his lips, and a taste of brandy and water went all through
him; and when he fell into sweet slumber and awoke, and found the
teaspoon ready at his lips again, he had to lift a little the two hands
lying before him on the coverlet to know that they were his--they were
so wasted and yellow. He turned his eyes, and through the white gauze of
the mosquito-bar saw, for an instant, a strange and beautiful young
face; but the lids fell over his eyes, and when he raised them again the
blue-turbaned black nurse was tucking the covering about his feet.

"Sister!"

No answer.

"Where is my mother?"

The negress shook her head.

He was too weak to speak again, but asked with his eyes so persistently,
and so pleadingly, that by and by she gave him an audible answer. He
tried hard to understand it, but could not, it being in these words:

"_Li pa' oule vini 'ci--li pas capabe_."

Thrice a day, for three days more, came a little man with a large head
surrounded by short, red curls and with small freckles in a fine skin,
and sat down by the bed with a word of good cheer and the air of a
commander. At length they had something like an extended conversation.

"So you concluded not to die, eh? Yes, I'm the doctor--Doctor Keene. A
young lady? What young lady? No, sir, there has been no young lady here.
You're mistaken. Vagary of your fever. There has been no one here but
this black girl and me. No, my dear fellow, your father and mother can't
see you yet; you don't want them to catch the fever, do you? Good-bye.
Do as your nurse tells you, and next week you may raise your head and
shoulders a little; but if you don't mind her you'll have a backset, and
the devil himself wouldn't engage to cure you."

The patient had been sitting up a little at a time for several days,
when at length the doctor came to pay a final call, "as a matter of
form;" but, after a few pleasantries, he drew his chair up gravely, and,
in a tender tone--need we say it? He had come to tell Joseph that his
father, mother, sisters, all, were gone on a second--a longer--voyage,
to shores where there could be no disappointments and no
fevers, forever.

"And, Frowenfeld," he said, at the end of their long and painful talk,
"if there is any blame attached to not letting you go with them, I