for Dr. Ives; but the rector was absent from home on a visit to a sick parishioner, and it was late in the evening before he arrived.  Within three hours of the accident, however, Dr. Black, the surgeon of the ——­th, reached the hall, and immediately proceeded to examine the wound.  The ball had penetrated the right breast, and gone directly through the body; it was extracted with very little difficulty, and his attendant acquainted the anxious friends of Denbigh that the heart certainly, and he hoped the lungs, had escaped uninjured.  The ball was a very small one, and the principal danger to be apprehended was from fever:  he had taken the usual precautions against that, and should it not set in with a violence greater than he apprehended at present, the patient might be abroad within the month.

“But,” continued the surgeon, with the hardened indifference of his profession, “the gentleman has had a narrow chance in the passage of the ball itself; half an inch would have settled his accounts with this world.”

This information greatly relieved the family, and orders were given to preserve a silence in the house that would favor the patient’s disposition to quiet, or, if possible, sleep.

Dr. Ives now reached the hall.  Mrs. Wilson had never Been the rector in the agitation, or with the want of self-command he was in, as she met him at the entrance of the house.

“Is he alive?—­is there hope?—­where is George?”—­cried the doctor, as he caught the extended hand of Mrs. Wilson.  She briefly acquainted him with the surgeon’s report, and the reasonable ground there was to expect Denbigh would survive the injury.

“May God be praised,” said the rector, in a suppressed voice, and he hastily withdrew into another room.  Mrs. Wilson followed him slowly and in silence; but was checked on opening the door with the sight of the rector on his knees, the tears stealing down his venerable cheeks in quick succession.  “Surely,” thought the widow, as she drew back unnoticed, “a youth capable of exciting such affection in a man like Dr. Ives, cannot be unworthy.”

Denbigh, hearing of the arrival of his friend, desired to see him alone.  Their conference was short, and the rector returned from it with increased hopes of the termination of this dreadful accident.  He immediately left the hall for his own house, with a promise of returning early on the following morning.

During the night, however, the symptoms became unfavorable; and before the return of Dr. Ives, Denbigh was in a state of delirium from the height of his fever, and the apprehensions of his friends were renewed with additional force.

“What, what, my good sir, do you think of him?” said the baronet to the family physician, with an emotion that the danger of his dearest child would not have exceeded, and within hearing of most of his children, who were collected in the ante-chamber of the room in which Denbigh was placed.