When I sat alone beside Nancy's bed, that night, I had several sides of
her sad story in mind, but none of them lessened the dreariness of the
tragedy. Before my brief acquaintance with her, Nancy was widely known
as a travelling-preacher, one who had "the power." She must have been a
strangely attractive creature, in those early days, alert, intense,
gifted with such a magnetic reaching into another life that it might
well set her aside from the commoner phases of a common day, and
crowned, as with flame, by an unceasing aspiration for the highest. At
thirty, she married a dashing sailor, marked by the sea, even to the
rings in his ears; and when I knew them, they were solidly comfortable
and happy, in a way very reassuring to one who could understand Nancy's
temperament; for she was one of those who, at every step, are flung
aside from the world's sharp corners, bruised and bleeding.

As to the storm and shipwreck of her life, I learned no particulars
essentially new. Evidently her husband had suddenly run amuck, either
from the monotony of his inland days, or from the strange passion he
had conceived for a woman who was Nancy's opposite.

That night, I sat in the poor, bare little room, beside the billowing
feather-bed where Nancy lay propped upon pillows, and gazing with
bright, glad eyes into my face, one thin little hand clutching mine
with the grasp of a soul who holds desperately to life. And yet Nancy
was not clinging to life itself; she only seemed to be, because she
clung to love.

"I'm proper glad to see ye," she kept saying, "proper glad."

We were quite alone. The fire burned cheerily in the kitchen stove, and