the Rector
himself. Lucy was standing by the pillow of the sick woman with a watchful
readiness visible to the most unskilled eye--ready to raise her, to
change her position, to attend to her wants almost before they were
expressed. The contrast was wonderful. She had thrown off her bonnet
and shawl, and appeared, not like a stranger, but somehow in her natural
place, despite the sweet youthful beauty of her looks, and the gay girlish
dress with its floating ribbons. These singular adjuncts notwithstanding,
no homely nurse in a cotton gown could have looked more alert or
serviceable, or more natural to the position, than Lucy did. The poor
Rector, taking the seat which the little maid placed for him directly in
the centre of the room, looked at the nurse and the patient with a gasp
of perplexity and embarrassment. A deathbed, alas! was an unknown region
to him.

"Oh, sir, I'm obliged to you for coming--oh, sir, I'm grateful to you,"
cried the poor woman in the bed. "I've been ill, off and on, for years,
but never took thought to it as I ought. I've put off and put off,
waiting for a better time--and now, God help me, it's perhaps too late.
Oh, sir, tell me, when a person's ill and dying, is it too late?"

Before the Rector could even imagine what he could answer, the sick woman
took up the broken thread of her own words, and continued--

"I don't feel to trust as I ought to--I don't feel no confidence," she
said, in anxious confession. "Oh, sir, do you think it matters if one
feels it?--don't you think things might be right all the same though
we _were_ uneasy in our minds? My thinking can't change it one way or
another. Ask the good gentleman to speak to me, Miss Lucy, dear--he'll
mind what _you_ say."

A look from Lucy quickened the Rector's speech, but increased his
embarrassments. "It--it isn't her doctor she has no confidence in?" he
said, eagerly.

The poor woman gave a little cry. "The doctor--the doctor! what can he
do to a poor dying creature? Oh, Lord bless you, it's none of them things
I'm thinking of; it's my soul--my soul!"

"But my poor good woman," said Mr Proctor, "though it is very good and
praiseworthy of you to be anxious about your soul, let us hope that there
is no such--no such _haste_ as you seem to suppose."

The patient opened her eyes wide, and stared, with the anxious look of
disease, in his face.

"I mean," said the good man, faltering under that gaze, "that I see no
reason for your