limp, white object in his arms; he bore it to the shore; he heard
them say that he had saved its life, and then he turned aside to
change his dripping garments and warm his icy limbs. This was the
first picture brought to his mind by Edith Hastings' voice. The
second was a sadder one, and he groaned aloud as he remembered how
from the time of the terrible cold taken then, and the severe
illness which followed, his eyesight had begun to fail--slowly,
very slowly, it is true--and for years he could not believe that
Heaven had in store for him so sad a fate. But it had come at
last--daylight had faded out and the night was dark around him.
Once, in his hour of bitterest agony, he had cursed that Swedish
baby, wishing it had perished in the waters of the Rhine, ere he
saved it at so fearful a sacrifice. But he had repented of the
wicked thought; he was glad he saved the pretty Petrea's child,
even though be should never see her face again. He knew not where
she was, that girlish wife, speaking her broken English for the
sake of her American husband, who was not always as kind to her as
he should have been. He had heard no tidings of her since that
fatal autumn. He had scarcely thought of her for months, but she
came back to him now, and it was Edith's voice which brought her.

"Poor blind man," he whispered aloud. "How like that was to
Petrea, when she said of my father, 'Poor, soft old man;'" and
then he wondered again who his visitor had been, and why she had
left him so abruptly.

It was a child, he knew, and he prized her gift the more for that,
for Richard Harrington was a dear lover of children and he kissed
the fair bouquet as he would not have kissed it had he known from
whom it came. Rising at last from his seat, he groped his way back