ust and the
dirt, and on the woman's face. I wanted to carry him into the room on
the other side--he was unconscious; but a doctor had come up with us,
and made us put him down on a bed there was in the corner. Then we got
some brandy and poured it down. The doctor examined him, looked at his
foot, threw something over it. "Nothing to be done," he said--"internal
injuries--he can't live half an hour." The next minute the poor fellow
opened his eyes. They had pulled away the bed from the wall. Your
husband was on the farther side, kneeling. When he opened his eyes,
clearly the first thing he saw was his wife. He half sprang up--Elsmere
caught him--and gave a horrible cry--indescribably horrible. "_At it
again, at it again! My God!_" Then he fell back fainting. They got the
wife out of the room between them--a perfect log--you could hear her
heavy breathing from the kitchen opposite. We gave him more brandy and
he came to again. He looked up in your husband's face. "She hasn't broke
out for two months," he said, so piteously, "two months--and now--I'm
done--I'm done--and she'll just go straight to the devil!" And it comes
out, so the neighbours told us, that for two years or more he had been
patiently trying to reclaim this woman, without a word of complaint to
anybody, though his life must have been a dog's life. And now, on his
deathbed, what seemed to be breaking his heart was, not that he was
dying, but that his task was snatched from him!'

Flaxman paused, and looked away out of window. He told his story with
difficulty.

'Your husband tried to comfort him--promised that the wife and children
should be his special care, that everything that could be done to save
and protect them should be done. And the poor little fellow looked up at
him, with the tears running down his cheeks, and--and--blessed him. "I
cared about nothing," he said, "when you came. You've been--God--to
me--I've seen Him--in you." Then he asked us to say something. Your
husband said verse after verse of the Psalms, of the Gospels, of St.
Paul. His eyes grew filmy, but he seemed every now and then to struggle
back to life, and as soon as he caught Elsmere's face his look
lightened. Towards the last he said something we none of us caught; but
your husband thought it was a line from Emily Bronte's "Hymn," which he
said to them last Sunday in lecture.'

He looked up at her interrogatively, but there was no response in her
face.

'I asked him about i