ertaken; but she soon learned to drop asleep at any
moment, and wake immediately when she was wanted; and thereafter her
strength was by no means so sorely tried.

Under her skillful nursing--skillful, not from experience, but simply
from her faith, whence came both conscience of and capacity for doing
what the doctor told her--things went well. It is from their want of
this faith, and their consequent arrogance and conceit, that the ladies
who aspire to help in hospitals give the doctors so much trouble: they
have not yet learned _obedience,_ the only path to any good, the one
essential to the saving of the world. One who can not obey is the
merest slave--essentially and in himself a slave. The crisis of Tom's
fever was at length favorably passed, but the result remained doubtful.
By late hours and strong drink, he had done not a little to weaken a
constitution, in itself, as I have said, far from strong; while the
unrest of what is commonly and foolishly called a bad conscience, with
misery over the death of his child and the conduct which had disgraced
him in his own eyes and ruined his wife's happiness, combined to retard
his recovery.

While he was yet delirious, and grief and shame and consternation
operated at will on his poetic nature, the things he kept saying over
and over were very pitiful; but they would have sounded more miserable
by much in the ears of one who did not look so far ahead as Mary. She,
trained to regard all things in their true import, was rejoiced to find
him loathing his former self, and beyond the present suffering saw the
gladness at hand for the sorrowful man, the repenting sinner. Had she
been mother or sister to him, she could hardly have waited on him with
more devotion or tenderness.

One day, as his wife was doing some little thing for him, he took her
hand in his feeble grasp, and pressing it to his face, wet with the
tears of reviving manhood, said:

"We might have been happy together, Letty, if I had but known how much
you were worth, and how little I was worth myself!--Oh me! oh me!"

He burst into an incontrollable wail that tortured Letty with its
likeness to the crying of her baby.

"Tom! my own darling Tom!" she cried, "when you speak as if I belonged
to you, it makes me as happy as a queen. When you are better, you will
be happy, too, dear. Mary says you will."

"O Letty!" he sobbed--"the baby!"

"The baby's all right, Mary says; and, some day, she says, he will ru