r object than
mere rest to her friend, who at last, very much ashamed and crying
softly, yet so weary that nothing on this earth seemed so desirable to
her as sleep, crept to her room, and lay down there as the pale morning
began to dawn. Betsy slept heavily in an easy-chair outside the door of
the sick-room. She was there at hand in case anything was wanted, but
she was happily unconscious where she was, sleeping the sleep of hard
work and a mind undisturbed. Phoebe had seen that the patient was
stirring out of the dull doze in which his faculties had been entirely
stilled and stupefied. He was rousing to uneasiness, if not to full
consciousness. Two or three times he made a convulsive movement, as if
to raise himself; once his eyes, which were half open, seemed to turn
upon her with a vague glimmer of meaning. How strangely she felt towards
him, as she sat there in the grey of the morning, sole guardian, sole
confidant of this erring and miserable man! The thought ran through her
with a strange thrill. He was nothing to her, and yet he was absolutely
in her power, and in all heaven and earth there seemed no one who was
capable of protecting him, or cared to do so, except herself only. She
sat looking at him with a great pity in her mind, determined to be his
true protector, to deliver him from what he himself had done. She had
not realized at first what it was he had done, and indeed it was only
now that its full enormity, or rather its full consequences (which were
the things that affected her most urgently), made themselves apparent
to her. Generalizations are unsafe things; and whether it was because
she was a woman that Phoebe, passing over the crime, fixed her thoughts
upon the punishment, I do not venture to say; but she did so. After all
a few lines of writing on a bit of paper is not a crime which affects
the imagination of the inexperienced. Had it been a malicious slander
Phoebe would have realized the sin of it much more clearly; but the copy
of her grandfather's signature did not wound her moral sense in the same
way, though it was a much more serious offence. That Mr. May could have
intended to rob him of the money appeared impossible to her; and no
doubt the borrowing of the signature was wrong--very wrong. Yes, of
course it was horribly, fatally wrong; but still it did not set her
imagination aglow with indignant horror, as smaller affairs might have
done. But the consequences--disgrace, ruin, the loss of