own bed; she made up the fire. She swathed him in fresh, warm
wrappings, and laid him on the flags before the fire, sitting herself
at his head, and holding it in her lap, while she tenderly wiped his
loose, wet hair, curly still, although its colour had changed from
nut-brown to iron-gray since she had seen it last. From time to time
she bent over the face afresh, sick, and fain to believe that the
flicker of the fire-light was some slight convulsive motion. But the
dim, staring eyes struck chill to her heart. At last she ceased her
delicate, busy cares: but she still held the head softly, as if
caressing it. She thought over all the possibilities and chances in
the mingled yarn of their lives that might, by so slight a turn, have
ended far otherwise. If her mother's cold had been early tended, so
that the responsibility as to her brother's weal or woe had not
fallen upon her; if the fever had not taken such rough, cruel hold on
Will; nay, if Mrs. Gale, that hard, worldly sister, had not
accompanied him on his last visit to Yew Nook--his very last before
this fatal, stormy might; if she had heard his cry,--cry uttered by
these pale, dead lips with such wild, despairing agony, not yet three
hours ago!--O! if she had but heard it sooner, he might have been
saved before that blind, false step had precipitated him down the
rock! In going over this weary chain of unrealized possibilities,
Susan learnt the force of Peggy's words. Life was short, looking
back upon it. It seemed but yesterday since all the love of her
being had been poured out, and run to waste. The intervening years--
the long monotonous years that had turned her into an old woman
before her time--were but a dream.

The labourers coming in the dawn of the winter's day were surprised
to see the fire-light through the low kitchen-window. They knocked,
and hearing a moaning answer, they entered, fearing that something