wearing himself out in
his own room as I was wearing myself out here, in restless inactivity. He
expected her to sink and never to recover consciousness, and was loud in
his expressions of rebellion against the men who dared to keep him from
her bedside when her life was trembling in the balance. But the nurse had
hopes and so had the doctor. As for Carmel's looks, they were greatly
changed, but beautiful still in spite of the cruel scar left by her fall
against the burning bars of her sister's grate. No delirium disturbed the
rigid immobility in which she now lay. I could await her awakening with
quiet confidence in the justice of God.

Thus Clifton, in his ignorance.

The day was a bleak one, dispiriting in itself even to those who could go
about the streets and lose themselves in their tasks and round of duties.
To me it was a dead blank, marked by such interruptions as necessarily
took place under the prison routine. The evening hours which followed
them were no better. The hands on my watch crawled. When the door finally
opened, it came as a shock. I seemed to be prepared for anything but the
termination of my suspense. I knew that it was Clifton who entered, but I
could not meet his eye. I dug my nails into my palms, and waited for his
first word. When it came, I felt my spirits go down, down--I had thought
them at their lowest ebb before. He hesitated, and I started up:

"Tell me," I cried. "Carmel is dead!"

"Not dead," said he, "but silly. Her testimony is no more to be relied
upon than that of any other wandering mind."

XXII

"BREAK IN THE GLASS!"

This inundation of mistempered humour
Rests by you only to be qualified.

_King John_.

It was some time before I learned the particulars of this awakening.

It had occurred at sunset. A level beam of light had shot across the
bed, and the nurse had moved to close the blind, when a low exclamation
from the doctor drew her back, to mark the first faint fluttering of the
snowy lids over the long-closed eyes. Afterwards she remembered what a
picture her youthful patient made, with the hue of renewed life creeping
into her cheeks, in faint reflection of the nest of roseate colour in
which she lay.

Carmel's hair was dark; so were her exquisitely pencilled eye-brows, and
the long lashes which curled upward from her cheek. In her surroundings
of pink--warm pink, such as lives in the heart of the sea-shell--their
duskiness took on an added beauty; an