night. But the next day, when she come back to tell us when she was going to start for Dixie, she was took down right here, that suddin. There's been a good deal of that sickness round here sense, and fatalish, most always. But I tell 'em it took the smartest of the lot off first, when it took Nancy."
The doctor stood there when the teller of this story had stopped speaking. He was not looking at him,—of that the old man was certain. He seemed to be looking nowhere, and to see nothing that was near or visible.
"Come into the house and take something," said Uncle Elkins, for he began to be alarmed.
"Was Janet here?" asked the doctor, as if he had not heard the invitation.
"We had to send for her. Nancy was calling for her all the time," said Farmer Elkins, as if he doubted how far this story ought to be continued, for he did not understand the man before him. He only knew that once he had fallen down on his door-step, and lain helpless beneath his roof hard on to two months; and he watched him now as if he anticipated some renewal of that old attack,—and there was no Nancy now to nurse, and watch, and slave herself to death for him; for that was the way folk in the house were talking about Nancy and her husband in these days.
"Did she get here in time? Who went after her?"
"The minister went. We had 'em here a fortnight,—well on to 't."
"What, the minister, too?"
"No, I mean the young woman who come from Charlestown with Jenny. Her name was—" He paused long, endeavoring to recall that name. It trembled on the doctor's lips, but he did not utter it. At last said Farmer Elkins, "There! it was Miss Amey,—Amey? Yes. She took the little girl back hum with her. It was right in there, in the room where you had that spell of fever of yourn. She got you well through that! Ef anything could 'a' brought her through that turn, your letter would. It came across my mind once that, as she'd saved your life, may be you was going to save hern by that are letter! And she was so determined to get to your hospital!"
"Thank God she got the letter, any way!" exclaimed the doctor.
At that the old man walked into the house to set its best cheer before Nancy's husband, who looked so much like a mourner as he stood there under the trees, with the bitter recollections of the past overwhelming every other thought and feeling of the present.
Because it seemed to him that he could not sleep under old Elkins's roof that night, he remained there and slept there,—in the room where his fever ran its course,—in the room where Nancy died.
Because this story of the last months of her life was as gall and wormwood to him, he refused it not, but went over it with his wife's relations, and helped them spread a decent pall, according to the custom of mourners; over what had been.
Was he endeavoring to deceive himself and others into the belief that he was a mourning man? He was but accepting the varied humiliations of death; for they do not all pertain to the surrendering life. He was not thinking at all of his loss through her, nor of his gain by her. He was thinking, as he stood above the grave of fifteen years, how high Disgrace and Misery had heaped the mound. So bitterly he was thinking of the past, it was without desire that he at last arose and faced the future.
When he went to Charlestown—for a man on furlough had no time to lose—and saw his Janet in the Colonel's house,—Miss Ames took Janet home with her after that death and funeral,—when he saw how fair and beautiful a promise of girlhood was budding on the poor neglected branch, he said to his assistant, "Will you keep this child with you until the war is over? I am afraid to touch her, or interfere with her destiny. It has
