when the light of the moon is still shining in, broad and clear, tracing silver patterns on the carpet and the wall, and bend my head down to look into my darling's face. What if he have sickened while I lay senselessly, dully asleep? But he looks just as he did when I saw his face last, and I go to sleep again with my arms round him. Wattie went to bed with the sunbeams; he wakes with the sunlight, and oh! the happiness that fills my heart as he runs about, active and bright, getting into every bit of mischief, bless him! that the place contains. I wash him, dress him, feed him with the bread and milk nurse brings at seven o'clock; then I dress myself, and we go out together into the glorious morning, among the sparkling dewdrops and early radiance that seem to have no knowledge or thought of disease, pain, and death. And all through the day we are so happy together, he and I. No fits of passion or sulkiness ever deform the character of Paul's little son; he is as spirited as he is gentle, led by a word, turned to iron by an injustice, as his father ever was.
"Symonds is very ill," say the accounts gleaned from a distance. Can it be possible, I ask, trembling, that a woman so thoroughly infected with the fever could avoid giving it to the child she was always with? But the day wears on to eventide, and the roses do not burn too brightly in his cheeks, his steps know no flagging, and he goes to bed as he went last night, against his will.
It must be the very early morning, just when the moonlight has gone and the greyness of the dawn has not yet appeared, that I am awakened by a hoarse little voice asking for "water." It is one of the few words that I have been able to teach Wattie's baby-lips to utter. I do not move for a moment; I am like a dead creature who has been slain by one lightning blow from a two-edged sword—I know what the cry means. . . . I know that Death has called my angel away from me. . . .
Then I rise stiffly, and bring water, which already, already it
