ccustomed to find nought but either mockery or
disdain, did he recall his friend's prophetic words: "Out of my death
will grow your happiness." Was there happiness indeed yet in store in
the future? Alas, happiness for them dwelt in oblivion; and, some day,
"remembrance would wake with all her busy train, and swell at _her_
breast," and then----

Meanwhile, however, the present had a sweetness of its own. There was
now free scope for the passion of devotedness which almost made up the
sum of this man's character--a character which, to the Molly of
wayward days, to the hot-pulsed, eager, impatient "Murthering Moll,"
had been utterly incomprehensible and uncongenial. And to the Molly
crushed in the direst battle of life, whom one more harshness of fate,
even the slightest, would have straightaway hurled back into the grave
that had barely been baulked of its prey, it gave the very food and
breath of her new existence.

Week after week passed in this guise, during which her natural
healthiness slowly but surely re-established itself; weeks that were
happy to him, in later life, to look back upon, though now full of an
anxiousness which waxed stronger as recovery drew nearer.

There was little talking between them, and that kept by him studiously
on subjects of purely ephemeral, childish interest. Her mind, by the
happy dispensation of nature which facilitates healing by all means
when once healing has begun, was blank to any impressions save the
luxury of rest, of passive enjoyment, indifferent to ought but the
passing present. She took pleasure in flowers, in the gambols of pet
animals, in long listless spells of cloud-gazing when the heavens were
bright, in the presence of her husband in whom she only saw a being
whose eyes were always beautiful with the light of kindness, whose
touch invariably soothed her when fatigue or irritation marred the
even course of her feelings.

She had ever a smile for him, which entered his soul like the radiance
of sunshine through a stormy sky.

Thus the days went by. Like a child she ate and slept and
chattered--irresponsible chatter that was music to his ear. She
laughed and teased him too, as a child would; till sad, as it was, he
hugged the incomplete happiness to his heart with a dire foreboding
that it might be all he was to know in life.

But one evening, in sudden freak, she bade him open the shutters, pull
the curtains, and raise the window that she might, from her pillow,