to the kitchen, where, in safety, she sank
into a chair, convulsed with laughter, which she instinctively muffled
in her apron.

Then came the day when the man, weak and worn with his struggle, looked
up at his gentle old nurse with the light of sanity in his deep
blue eyes. Very tired eyes they were, and filled with painful
memories,--filled, too, with worshipping gratitude and wonder.

She smiled down at him with delighted triumph, and drawing a chair close
beside the bed, seated herself and placed her soft hand on his where it
lay on the coverlid.

"You are much better, this morning," she said cheerily. "You will soon
be all right, now." And as she looked into the eyes that regarded hers
so questioningly, there was in her face and manner no hint of doubt, or
pretense, or reproach;--only confidence and love.

He spoke slowly, as if feeling for words: "I have been in Hell; and
you--you have brought me out. Why did you do it?"

"Because you are mine," she answered, with her low chuckling laugh. It
was so good to have him able to talk to her rationally after those long
hours of fighting.

"Because I am yours?" he repeated, puzzling over her words.

"Yes," she returned, with a hint of determined proprietorship in her
voice; "because you belong to me. You see, that eddy where your boat
landed is my property, and so anything that drifts down the river and
lodges there belongs to me. Whatever the river brings to me, is mine.
The river brought you, and so--" She finished with another laugh,--a
laugh that was filled with tender mother-yearning.

The blue eyes smiled back at her for a moment; then she saw them darken
with painful memories.

"Oh, yes; the river," he said. "I wanted the river to do something for
me, and--and it did something quite different from what I wanted."

"Of course," she returned, eagerly, "the river is always like that. It
always does the thing you don't expect it to do. Just like life itself.
Don't you see? It begins somewhere away off at some little spring, and
just keeps going and going and going; and thousands and thousands of
other springs, scattered all over the country, start streams and creeks
and branches that run into it, and make it bigger and bigger, as it
winds and curves and twists along, until it finally reaches the great
sea, where its waters are united with all the waters from all the rivers
in all the world. And in all of its many, many miles, from that first
tiny spring to