cribe, unless by saying that she thought us where we
wished to be. Perhaps it would be more exact to say, _She felt us_.
It was as if the great power of the mother's love in her had become a
new bodily faculty by which she was able, with extraordinary disregard
of the laws of distance, to move herself and to draw another to the
suffering child. I should say that I perceived at once, in the
presence of this sweet woman, that there were possibilities and
privileges in the state immediately succeeding death, which had been
utterly denied to me, and were still unknown to me. It was easy to see
that her personal experience in the new condition differed as much from
mine as our lives had differed in the time preceding death. She had
been a patient, unworldly, and devout sufferer; a chronic invalid, who
bore her lot divinely. Her soul had been as full of trust and
gentleness, of the forgetting of self and the service of others, of the
scorn of pain, and of what she called trust in Heaven, as any woman's
soul could be.

I had never seen the moment when I could withhold my respect from the
devout nature of Mrs. Faith, any more than I could from her manner of
enduring suffering; or, I might add, if I could expect the remark to be
properly understood,--from her strong and intelligent trust in me.
Physicians know what sturdy qualities it takes to make a good patient.
Perhaps they are, to some extent, the same which go to make a good
believer; but in this direction I am less informed.

During our passage from the hospital to the house, Mrs. Faith had not
spoken to me; her whole being seemed, as nearly as I could understand
it, to be absorbed in the process of getting there. It struck me that
she was still unpractised in the use of a new and remarkable faculty,
which required strict attention from her, like any other as yet
unlearned art.

"_You_ are not turned out of your own home it seems!" I exclaimed
impulsively, as we entered the house together.

"Oh, no, _no_!" she cried. "Who is? Who could be? Why, Doctor, are
_you_?"

"Death is a terrible respecter of persons," I answered drearily. I
could not further explain myself at that moment.

"I have been away from Charley a good while," she anxiously replied;
"it is the first time I have left him since I died. But I had to find
you, Doctor. Charley should not die--I can't have Charley die--for his
poor father's sake. But I feel quite safe about him now I have got