other. How little I remember of her! and yet
this was like my memory,--sweetly gentle, loving past expression's
power, no taint of earth therein. Another came up. I did not know it.
Something whispered, "It is of you." I almost heard the words with my
outward ears. I looked around the room. No one was with me. Stillness
reigned in the house.

"It takes Mr. Axtell a very long time to take his tea," I thought; "he
must know more of hunger's power than I.--I will look at the fire no
more," I said, slowly, to myself, and closed my eyelids, somewhat
willing to drop after all that they had endured that day.

A soft, silver, "swimming sound" floated through the room. It was the
clock upon the mantel sending out tones of time-hours. I looked up. It
was eleven of the clock. "I must have fallen asleep," I thought, and
threw off the folds of a shawl which I surely left on the sofa over
there when I seated myself in this chair. My head was upon a pillow,
downy and white, instead of the green vale of chair in which I had laid
it down. I sprang up. There was little of lamp-light in the room. I saw
something that looked marvellously like somebody, near the sofa. It was
Katie, my good little friend Katie. She was sitting on a footstool with
her head upon her hands, and, poor, tired child! fast asleep. I awoke
her.

"Who covered me up, Katie?" I asked.

"Mr. Abraham," said Katie; and her waking senses came back.

"And how did the pillow get under my head?"

"Mr. Abraham said 'he was sorry that you had come.' You looked very
white in your sleep, and he said 'you wouldn't wake up'; so I lifted
your head just a mite, and he fixed the pillow under it. He told me to
stay here until you awoke."

"Which I have most decidedly done, Katie," I said; and I fully
determined to take no more naps in this house.

How could it have happened? I accounted for the fact in the most
reasonable way I knew,--I, who rejoice in being reasonable,--by thinking
it occurred in consequence of my long watchfulness, and sombreness of
thought and soul.

"I am sorry that you didn't wake me," I said to Katie, as she moved the
chairs in the room to their respective places.

With the most childlike implicitness in the world, the little maid stood
still and looked at me.

"I _couldn't_, you know, Miss Percival, when Mr. Abraham told me not
to," were the positive words she used in giving her reason.

I forgave Katie, and wondered what the secret of this man's