pened rooms up-stairs. It was very hot;
sometimes he saw the nurses passing about. Presently he saw Emily. She
was to be one of the watchers that night with Anastasia.

The little creature a day or two after her accident, finding fault with
every one about her, and scarcely conscious that her own pain was to
blame because they could not please her, had peevishly complained that
she wanted Mrs. Nemily. Mrs. Nemily was a kind lady, and could tell her
much prettier stories, and not give her such nasty things to drink.

Emily was instantly made aware of this, but when she arrived her little
charge was past noticing any one. And yet Emily was full of hope.
Impassioned and confiding prayer sustained her courage. She had always
loved the little one keenly, and desired now with indescribable longing
that her father might be spared the anguish of parting with her thus.

Yes, there was Emily; John Mortimer saw her move toward the window, and
derived some faint comfort from the knowledge that she would be with
Anastasia for the night.

Lovely, pale, and calm, he saw and blessed her, but she could not see
him; and as she retired she too was added to the measure of his
self-reproaches. He had lost her, and that also he had but himself to
thank for; he himself, and no other, was to blame for it all.

He loved her. Oh yes, he had soon found out that he loved her! Fool! to
have believed that in the early prime of his life the deepest passions
of humanity were never to wake up again and assert themselves, because
for the moment they had fallen into a noonday sleep. Fool, doubly fool,
to have prided himself on the thought that this was so; and more than
all a fool, to have let his scorn of love appear and justify itself to
such a woman as Emily. Lovely and loving, what had he asked of her?
which was to be done without the reward of his love. To bring up for him
another woman's children, to manage a troublesome household, to let him
have leisure and leave to go away from her from time to time, that he
might pursue his literary tastes and his political destiny, to be
responsible, to be contented, and to be lost, name and ambition, in him
and his.

All this had flashed across his mind, and amazed him with his own
folly, before he reached the town on the morning that he left her. But
that was nothing to the knowledge that so soon followed, the discovery
that he loved her. For the first time in his life it seemed to be his
part in creat