Her first impulse was wild terror.  She was discovered; by whom, she knew not.  She clasped her evil treasure to her bosom, and thrusting Grace against the rock, fled wildly out.

“Mother!  Mother!” shrieked Grace, rushing after her.  The shawl fell from her shoulders.  Her mother looked back, and saw the white figure.

“God’s angel!  God’s angel, come to destroy me! as he came to Balaam!” and in the madness of her guilty fancy she saw in Grace’s hand the fiery sword which was to smite her.

Another step, looking backward still, and she had tripped over a stone.  She fell, and striking the back of her head against the rock, lay senseless.

Tenderly Grace lifted her up:  went for water to a pool near by; bathed her face, calling on her by every term of endearment.  Slowly the old woman recovered her consciousness, but showed it only in moans.  Her head was cut and bleeding.  Grace bound it up, and then taking that fatal belt, bound it next to her own heart, never to be moved from thence till she should put it into the hands of him to whom it belonged.

And then she lifted up her mother.

“Come home, darling mother;” and she tried to make her stand and walk.

The old woman only moaned, and waved her away impatiently.  Grace put her on her feet; but she fell again.  The lower limbs seemed all but paralysed.

Slowly that sweet saint lifted her, and laid her on her own back; and slowly she bore her homeward, with aching knees and bleeding feet; while before her eyes hung the picture of Him who bore his cross up Calvary, till a solemn joy and pride in that sacred burden seemed to intertwine itself with her deep misery.  And fainting every moment with pain and weakness, she still went on, as if by supernatural strength:  and murmured—­

“Thou didst bear more for me, and shall not I bear even this for Thee?”

Surely, if blest spirits can weep and smile over the woes and heroisms of us mortal men, faces brighter than the stars looked down on that fair girl that night, and in loving sympathy called her, too, blest.

At last it was over.  Undiscovered she reached home, laid her mother on the bed, and tended her till morning; but long ere morning dawned stupor had changed into delirium, and Grace’s ears were all on fire with words —­which those who have ever heard will have no heart to write.

And now, by one of those strange vagaries, in which epidemics so often indulge, appeared other symptoms; and by day-dawn cholera itself.

Heale, though recovering, was still too weak to be of use:  but, happily, the medical man sent down by the Board of Health was still in the town.

Grace sent for him; but he shook his head after the first look.  The wretched woman’s ravings at once explained the case, and made it, in his eyes, all but hopeless.

The sudden shock to body and mind, the sudden prostration of strength, had brought out the disease which she had dreaded so intensely, and against which she had taken so many precautions, and which yet lay, all the while, lurking unfelt in her system.