have no
chance at all. God bless her!" he cried, with a sudden burst of feeling,
"I would die for her myself. She got me out of a barrel of trouble with
his Excellency. She cared for my mother, a lonely outcast, and braved
death herself to go to her when she was dying of the fever. God bless
her!"

Lindy was standing in the doorway.

"Lan' sakes, Marse Nick, yo' gotter go," she said.

He rose and pressed my fingers. "I'll go," he said, and left me. Lindy
seated herself in the chair. She held in her hand a bowl of beef broth.
From this she fed me in silence, and when she left she commanded me to
sleep informing me that she would be on the gallery within call.

But I did not sleep at once. Nick's words had brought back a fact which
my returning consciousness had hitherto ignored. The birds sang in the
court-yard, and when the breeze stirred it was ever laden with a new
scent. I had been snatched from the jaws of death, my life was before
me, but the happiness which had thrilled me was gone, and in my weakness
the weight of the sadness which had come upon me was almost unbearable.
If I had had the strength, I would have risen then and there from my bed,
I would have fled from the city at the first opportunity. As it was, I
lay in a torture of thought, living over again every part of my life
which she had touched. I remembered the first long, yearning look I had
given the miniature at Madame Bouvet's. I had not loved her then. My
feeling rather had been a mysterious sympathy with and admiration for
this brilliant lady whose sphere was so far removed from mine. This was
sufficiently strange. Again, in the years of my struggle for livelihood
which followed, I dreamed of her; I pictured her often in the midst of
the darkness of the Revolution. Then I had the miniature again, which
had travelled to her, as it were, and come back to me. Even then it was
not love I felt but an unnamed sentiment for one whom I clothed with
gifts and attributes I admired: constancy, an ability to suffer and to
hide, decision, wit, refuge for the weak, scorn for the false. So I
named them at random and cherished them, knowing that these things were
not what other men longed for in women. Nay, there was another quality
which I believed was there--which I knew was there--a supreme tenderness
that was hidden like a treasure too sacred to be seen.

I did not seek to explain the mystery which had brought her across the
sea into that little garden of