about the hospital can tell."

When the letter fell from my trembling hand, when I first asked of my
own heart the fearful question:--"Have I, to whom the mere thought of
ever seeing this woman again has been as a pollution to shrink from, the
strength to stand by her death-bed, the courage to see her die?"--then,
and not till then, did I really know how suffering had fortified, while
it had humbled me; how affliction has the power to purify, as well as to
pain.

All bitter memory of the ill that she had done me, of the misery I had
suffered at her hands, lost its hold on my mind. Once more, her mother's
last words of earthly lament--"Oh, who will pray for her when I am
gone!" seemed to be murmuring in my ear--murmuring in harmony with
the divine words in which the Voice from the Mount of Olives taught
forgiveness of injuries to all mankind.

She was dying: dying among strangers in the pining madness of fever--and
the one being of all who knew her, whose presence at her bedside
might yet bring calmness to her last moments, and give her quietly and
tenderly to death, was the man whom she had pitilessly deceived and
dishonoured, whose youth she had ruined, whose hopes she had wrecked
for ever. Strangely had destiny brought us together--terribly had it
separated us--awfully would it now unite us again, at the end!

What were my wrongs, heavy as they had been; what my sufferings,
poignant as they still were, that they should stand between this dying
woman, and the last hope of awakening her to the consciousness that
she was going before the throne of God? The sole resource for her which
human skill and human pity could now suggest, embraced the sole chance
that she might still be recovered for repentance, before she was
resigned to death. How did I know, but that in those ceaseless cries
which had uttered my name, there spoke the last earthly anguish of
the tortured spirit, calling upon me for one drop of water to cool its
burning guilt--one drop from the waters of Peace?

I took up Mr. Bernard's letter from the floor on which it had fallen,
and re-directed it to my brother; simply writing on a blank place in the
inside, "I have gone to soothe her last moments." Before I departed, I
wrote to her father, and summoned him to her bedside. The guilt of his
absence--if his heartless and hardened nature did not change towards
her--would now rest with him, and not with me. I forbore from thinking
how he would answer my le