and deepest, she started from her half-doze
to see her father come stealthily out and go down the street. She must
have slept, she thought, rubbing her eyes, and watching him out of
sight,--and then, creeping out, turned to glance at the mill. She
cried out, shrill with horror. It was a live monster now,--in one
swift instant, alive with fire,--quick, greedy fire, leaping like
serpents' tongues out of its hundred jaws, hungry sheets of flame
maddening and writhing towards her, and under all a dull and hollow
roar that shook the night. Did it call her to her death? She turned
to fly, and then----He was alone, dying! He had been so kind to her!
She wrung her hands, standing there a moment. It was a brave hope that
was in her heart, and a prayer on her lips never left unanswered, as
she hobbled, in her lame, slow way, up to the open black door, and,
with one backward look, went in.

CHAPTER VIII.

There was a dull smell of camphor; a farther sense of coolness and
prickling wet on Holmes's hot, cracking face and hands; then silence
and sleep again. Sometime--when, he never knew--a gray light stinging
his eyes like pain, and again a slow sinking into warm, unsounded
darkness and unconsciousness. It might be years, it might be ages.
Even in after-life, looking back, he never broke that time into weeks
or days: people might so divide it for him, but he was uncertain,
always: it was a vague vacuum in his memory: he had drifted out of
coarse, measured life into some out-coast of eternity, and slept in its
calm. When, by long degrees, the shock of outer life jarred and woke
him, it was feebly done: he came back reluctant, weak: the quiet
clinging to him, as if he had been drowned in Lethe, and had brought
its calming mist with him out of the shades.

The low chatter of voices, the occasional lifting of his head on the
pillow, the very soothing draught, came to him unreal at first: parts
only of the dull, lifeless pleasure. There was a sharper memory
pierced it sometimes, making him moan and try to sleep,--a remembrance
of great, cleaving pain, of falling giddily, of owing life to some one,
and being angry that he owed it, in the pain. Was it he that had borne
it? He did not know,--nor care: it made him tired to think. Even when
he heard the name, Stephen Holmes, it had but a far-off meaning: he
never woke enough to know if it were his or not. He learned, long
after, to watch the red light curling among the