nt me. And it will be
for a short time,' said Henry, half repenting when the opposition had
given way.

'Oh, we shall get on very well,' said Minna, cheerfully; 'better,
perhaps for you know we don't mind Far West manners; and I'll have
learnt to do all sorts of things as well as Cora when you come home!'

And Henry, after a year's famine of practice, was in better spirits
than since that fatal summer morning. Averil felt how different a man
is in his vocation, and deprived of it.

'Oh yes,' she said to herself, 'if I had let ourselves be a drag on him
when he is so much needed, I could never have had the face to write to
our dear sufferer at home in his noble patience. It is better that we
should be desolate than that he should be a wreck, or than that mass of
sickness should be left untended! And the more desolate, the more sure
of One Protector.'

There was true heroism in the spirit in which this young girl braced
herself to uncomplaining acceptance of desertion in this unwholesome
swamp, with her two little ailing sisters, beside the sluggish stream,
amid the skeleton trees--heroism the greater because there was no
enthusiastic patriotism to uphold her--it was only the land of her
captivity, whence she looked towards home like Judah to Jerusalem.

CHAPTER XXIII

Prisoner of hope thou art; look up and sing,
In hope of promised spring.
Christian Year

In the summer of 1862, Tom May was to go up for his examination at the
College of Physicians, but only a day or two before it he made his
appearance at home, in as much excitement as it was in him to betray.
Hazlitt, the banker's clerk at Whitford, had written to him tidings of
the presentation of the missing cheque for L25, which Bilson had paid
to old Axworthy shortly before the murder, and which Leonard had
mentioned as in the pocket-book containing his receipt for the sum that
had been found upon him. Tom had made a halt at Whitford, and seen the
cheque, which had been backed by the word Axworthy, with an initial
that, like all such signatures of the nephew, might stand either for S.
or F., and the stiff office hand of both the elder and younger Axworthy
was so much alike, that no one could feel certain whose writing it was.
The long concealment, after the prisoner's pointed reference to it,
was, however, so remarkable, that the home conclave regarded the cause
as won; and the father and son hastened triumphantly to t