hich goes with all French blood, and remained standing. The
invalid stirred.

The physician came forward to the bedside. The patient could not have
been much over nineteen years of age. Her face was very pleasing; a
trifle slender in outline; the brows somewhat square, not wide; the
mouth small. She would not have been called beautiful, even in health,
by those who lay stress on correctness of outlines. But she had one
thing that to some is better. Whether it was in the dark blue eyes that
were lifted to the Doctor's with a look which changed rapidly from
inquiry to confidence, or in the fine, scarcely perceptible strands of
pale-brown hair that played about her temples, he did not make out; but,
for one cause or another, her face was of that kind which almost any
one has seen once or twice, and no one has seen often,--that seems to
give out a soft, but veritable, light.

She was very weak. Her eyes quickly dropped away from his, and turned
wearily, but peacefully, to those of her husband.

The Doctor spoke to her. His greeting and gentle inquiry were full of a
soothing quality that was new to the young man. His long fingers moved
twice or thrice softly across her brow, pushing back the thin, waving
strands, and then he sat down in a chair, continuing his kind, direct
questions. The answers were all bad.

He turned his glance to the quadroon; she understood it; the patient was
seriously ill. The nurse responded with a quiet look of comprehension.
At the same time the Doctor disguised from the young strangers this
interchange of meanings by an audible question to the quadroon.

"Have I ever met you before?"

"No, seh."

"What is your name?"

"Zenobie."

"Madame Zenobie," softly whispered the invalid, turning her eyes, with
a glimmer of feeble pleasantry, first to the quadroon and then to her
husband.

The physician smiled at her an instant, and then gave a few concise
directions to the quadroon. "Get me"--thus and so.

The woman went and came. She was a superior nurse, like so many of her
race. So obvious, indeed, was this, that when she gently pressed the
young husband an inch or two aside, and murmured that "de doctah" wanted
him to "go h-out," he left the room, although he knew the physician had
not so indicated.

By-and-by he returned, but only at her beckon, and remained at the
bedside while Madame Zenobie led the Doctor into another room to write
his prescription.

"Who are these people?" asked th