e could not raise his head or turn his
body. He could only rest utterly helpless and inert, and indifferent to
either life or death.

Of Liddy he thought many times, and of his mother and father as well,
and he wondered what they would say and how they would feel when the
tidings reached them. Then a kind-faced woman came and lifted his head
and held it while he took medicine or sipped broth, and then he was
wandering beside a brook again, or in green meadows. Later he could see
the white cots all about and the unceiled roof over his head and the
same motherly face, and he was asked who his friends were and whom he
would like to send for, and from that time on he began to hope.

Would the one human being on earth he cared most to see come so far, and
could she if she would? And would life still be left in him when she
reached his side; or would he have been carried out of the long, low
room, dead, as he had seen others carried? He wondered what she would
say or do when she came, and oh! if he could only know whether she was
coming! He could see the door at one corner of the room where she must
enter, and it was a little comfort to look at that. Then a resolution
and a feeling that he must live and be there when she came began to grow
upon him. He knew four days had passed since she had been sent for and
he could now count the hours, and from that time on his eyes were seldom
turned away from that door while he was awake. Did ever hours pass more
slowly than those? Could it be possible? I think not. He had no means of
knowing the time except to ask the nurse, and when night came he knew
that sleep might bridge a few hours more speedily.

Six days passed, and then in the gray light of the next morning he
opened his weary waiting eyes and saw bending over him the fair face
that for two long years, and all through his hopeless agony he had
longed for, and as he reached his hand to her in mute gratitude, unable
to speak, he felt it clasped, and the next instant she was on her knees
beside him and pressing a tear-wet face upon it, and he was listening to
the first prayer she ever uttered!

Gone now like a flash of light were all those weary months of
heart-hunger! Gone all the agony and despair of that day and night on
the battlefield! Gone all the hours of pain through which he counted the
moments one by one as he watched the door! No more was he lying upon a
narrow cot listening to the moans of the wounded as he saw the