kindly errand. Then up the street leapt news to the desolate pair: how
Rhoda and Christian lived; how their boat had been run down in the night,
and themselves snatched gallantly from death; how they had been put
ashore at the first port a mastless ship could win, and there received by
the pity of strangers; and how all the while Christian lay raving and
dying, and by now must be dead.

But to hope reborn this last was unbelievable. Lois said she should find
him alive and to live, since Heaven had twice willed him to escape the
jaws of death. And her heart of confidence she kept for more than two
weary days of difficulty and delay. But when she reached his bed her hope
wavered; she saw a shorn head, and a face blanched and bloodless like
bone, fallen out of a shape she knew into strange hollows, with eyes
showing but a glassy strip, and grey, breathless lips. 'To-night,' said
Rhoda.

Breathless also through the night they watched till came the first shiver
of dawn. Then his eyelids rose; he looked with recognition at Lois, and
moved a hand towards hers; and with a quiet sigh his eyes closed, not for
death, but for blessed, feverless, breathing sleep.

The one who wept then was Lois, and Rhoda clasped her in a passionate
embrace of comfort, and herself shed no tear.

The child had deserted Rhoda for ever, as the boy Christian. She knew it:
she had kissed her childhood dead on his lips, and now past any recall it
had been buried, and lay deep under such a weight of sorrow as fate can
hew only for a woman full. No tear she shed, no word she said, and she
ordered her face to be serene.

She had a word for Lois not at first to be understood. 'God has been good
to heal,' she would say; but the whole truth did not declare till Lois,
regarding the future again, had sighed: 'Where shall he go?' 'Home,' said
Rhoda. Lois shook her head sadly: 'He could not bear it.' The girl, with
arms round her neck and a hid face, whispered again: 'God has been good
to heal--I think so--do you not know it yet?'

So a day came when a wasted shadow of the old Christian was borne along
the quay and up the street, while men and women stept out to observe.
Their eyes he met with placid recognition, clear of any disquiet.

The devil had gone out of the fellow at last, they said, when he could
not lift a hand for injury, nor gloom a resentful look. And so hard
doings were justified; and none intolerant could begrudge him the life he
had brought