ressingly across his forehead
just as they had done years ago in Rome, when she soothed the pain
away. There certainly was a mesmeric influence emanating from those
hands, and Arthur felt its power, growing very quiet and at last
falling away to sleep, while the soft passes went on, and Lucy held
her breath lest she would waken him.

"She was a famous nurse," the physician said when he came,
constituting her his coadjutor and making her tread wild with joy and
importance when he gave his patient's medicine into her hands.

"It was hardly proper for her niece to stay," Mrs. Hetherton
thought, but Lucy was one who could trample down proprieties, and it
was finally arranged that Fanny should stay with her. So, while Fanny
went to bed and slept, Lucy sat all night in the sick room with Mrs.
Brown, and when the next morning came she was looking very pale and
languid, but very beautiful withal. At least, such was the mental
compliment paid her by Thornton Hastings, who was passing through
Hanover and had stopped over one train to see his old college friend
and, perhaps, tell him what he began to feel it was his duty to tell
him in spite of his promise to Anna. She was nearly well now and had
driven with him twice to the park, but he could not be insensible to
what she suffered, or how she shrank from having the projected wedding
discussed, and, in his intense pity for her, he had half resolved to
break his word and tell Arthur what he knew. But he changed his mind
when he had been in Hanover a few hours and watched the little fairy
who, like some ministering angel, glided about the sick room, showing
herself every whit a woman, and making him repent that he had ever
called her frivolous or silly. She was not either, he said, and, with
a magnanimity for which he thought himself entitled to a good deal of
praise, he even felt that it was very possible for Arthur to love the
gentle little girl who smoothed his pillows so tenderly and whose
fingers threaded so lovingly the damp, brown locks when she thought
he, Thornton, was not looking on. She was very coy of him and very
distant towards him, too, for she had not forgotten his sin, and she
treated him at first with a reserve for which he could not account.
But, as the days went on, and Arthur grew so sick that his
parishioners began to tremble for their young minister's life, and to
think it perfectly right for Lucy to stay with him, even if she was
assisted in her labor of lo