spered as the three gentlemen appeared at the
door. "She is now calmer than ever, but the slightest noise will
excite her again."

The medical gentlemen entered the room with noiseless steps, and
remained for several minutes watching the sleeping sufferer. Her
emaciated features were flushed from excitement and her breathing was
hard and difficult. In her sleep, she softly murmured words which told
of happy years that were past and vanished forever and could never
more return. The broken sentences told of love and happiness, and a
deep feeling of sympathy stole into the breasts of her hearers as they
listened to her ravings. Alfred was sitting by the bed looking on the
wreck of his wife, and when the doctors entered, he arose and briefly
saluted them. To their words of condolence he made no reply, for his
heart was bitter with grief, and he felt that consolatory language was
a mockery, and however well meant and sincere it may have been, it
could not relieve the agony he felt at witnessing the destruction of
his family's happiness. Oh, let those alone who have felt the burning
of the heart when it was wrung with agony, appreciate the misery of
men struck down from the pedestal of earthly joy and buried in the
gulf of wretchedness. We have known homes where the heart beat high
with joy, and life promised to be a future of happiness and peace;
where the fairest flowers of affection seemed to bloom for us, and
over our pathway floated its perfume, while before our sight, its
loveliness remained undiminished until that fatal delusion, Hope,
intoxicated the senses and made us oblivions to reality. A brief
spell--a charm of short duration, and the hallucination is dispelled,
only to leave us seared and blasted, almost hating mankind, and
wearing the mask of the hypocrite, leading a double life, to hide the
sears left by unsuccessful ambition, or disappointed aspiration. What
were death itself compared with the misery of finding, when too late,
that the hopes and happiness we deemed reality, were but a shadow, not
a substance, which lingered for awhile and Left us to curse our fate.

And yet it is but life--one hour on the pinnacle, the other on the
ground. But to our tale.

After remaining by the bedside for several minutes, the doctors were
about to leave, when Mrs. Wentworth awoke from her sleep, and gazed
with an unmeaning look upon the gentlemen. She recognized no one--not
even her husband, who never left her, save whe