regard to her, making him almost as nervous as on the day when she
appeared before him as candidate No. 1.

"Feel her pulse, doctor; they are faster most than you can count,"
Grandma Markham whispered; and thus entreated, the doctor took the
soft hand in his own, its touch sending through his frame a thrill
such as the touch of no other hand had ever sent.

Somehow the act reassured him. All fear of Maddy vanished, leaving
behind only an intense desire to help, if possible, the young girl
whose fingers seemed to cling around his own as he felt for and found
the rapid pulse,

"If she could awaken," he said, laying the hand softly down and
placing his other upon her forehead, where the great sweat drops lay.

And, after a time, Maddy did awaken, but in the eyes fixed, for a
moment, so intently on him, there was no look of recognition, and the
doctor was half glad that it was so. He did not wish her to associate
him with her late disastrous disappointment; he would rather she
should think of him as some one come to cure her, for cure her he
would, he said to himself, as he gazed into her childish face and
thought how sad it was for such as she to die. When first he entered
the cottage he had been struck with the extreme plainness of the
furniture, betokening that wealth had not there an abiding place, but
now he forgot everything except the sick girl, who grew more and more
restless, talking of him and the Latin verb which meant "to love," she
said, and which was not in the grammar.

"Guy was a fool and I was a brute," the doctor muttered, as he folded