ection. It would have been worth all the apothecary's arsenic and
iron for someone just to have told him so.

A Suez physician once said to me--I was struck with the originality of
the remark--that one man's cure is another's poison. Not even to himself
would March confess that this room, so specially adapted for the average
sick man, was for him the worst that could have been picked out. It
showed him constantly all Suez. Poor little sweating and fanning Suez,
grown fat, and already getting lean again on the carcass of one man's
unsalable estate!

"Come here," said Fannie Ravenel behind the blinds of her highest
window, to one who loved her still, but rarely had time to visit her
now, "look. That's John March's room. O sweet, how's he ever again to
match himself to our littleness and sterility without shriveling down to
it himself? And yet that, and not the catching of scamps or recovery of
lands, is going to be his big task. For I don't think he'll ever go 'way
from here; he's just the kind that'll always feel too many obligations
to stay; and I think his sickness will be a blessing straight from God,
to him and to all of us who love him, if it will only give him time to
see what his true work is--God bless him!" The two stood in loose
embrace looking opposite ways, until the speaker asked, "Don't you
believe it?"

"I don't know," said the other, gently drawing her away from the window.

Fannie yielded a step or two and then as gently resisted. "Sweetheart,"
she cried, with a melting gaze, "you don't suppose--just because I
choose to remember what he is and what he is suffering--you can't
imagine--O if _you_ mistake me I shall simply perish!"

"I know you too well, dear," caressingly murmured the guest, and they
talked of other things--"gusset and band and seam"--for it was Saturday
and there was to be a small occasion on the morrow. But that same night,
long after the house's last light was out, the guest said her prayers at
that window.

The windows of March's chamber, albeit his bed's head was against the
one to the east, opened four ways. The one on the west looked down over
the court-house square and up the verdant avenue which became the pike.
Here on the right stood the _Courier_ building! There was Captain
Champion going by it; honest ex-treasurer of the defunct Land Company.
His modest yet sturdy self-regard would not even yet let him see that he
had been only a cover for the underground doublings of sh