It was magnificent, and the gentle face under the nurse’s cap shone with appreciation and admiration as she smiled her sympathy and understanding.

“My son—­my son—­will come—­to-day.”  The voice was stronger, and, with the eyes, expressed a conviction—­a certainty—­with the faintest shadow of a question.

The nurse looked at her watch.  “The boat was due in New York, early this morning, madam.”

A step sounded in the hall outside.  The nurse started, and turned quickly toward the door.  But the woman said, “The doctor.”  And, again, the fire that burned in those sunken eyes was hidden wearily under their dark lids.

The white-haired physician and the nurse, at the farther end of the room, spoke together in low tones.  Said the physician,—­incredulous,—­“You say there is no change?”

“None that I can detect,” breathed the nurse.  “It is wonderful!”

“Her mind is clear?”

“As though she were in perfect health.”

The doctor took the nurse’s chart.  For a moment, he studied it in silence.  He gave it back with a gesture of amazement.  “God! nurse,” he whispered, “she should be in her grave by now!  It’s a miracle!  But she has always been like that—­” he continued, half to himself, looking with troubled admiration toward the bed at the other end of the room—­“always.”

He went slowly forward to the chair that the nurse placed for him.  Seating himself quietly beside his patient, and bending forward with intense interest, his fine old head bowed, he regarded with more than professional care the wasted face upon the pillow.

The doctor remembered, too well, when those finely moulded features—­now, so worn by sorrow, so marked by sickness, so ghastly in the hue of death—­were rounded with young-woman health and tinted with rare loveliness.  He recalled that day when he saw her a bride.  He remembered the sweet, proud dignity of her young wifehood.  He saw her, again, when her face shone with the glad triumph and the holy joy of motherhood.

The old physician turned from his patient, to look with sorrowful eyes about the room that was to witness the end.

Why was such a woman dying like this?  Why was a life of such rich mental and spiritual endowments—­of such wealth of true culture—­coming to its close in such material poverty?

The doctor was one of the few who knew.  He was one of the few who understood that, to the woman herself, it was necessary.

There were those who—­without understanding, for the sake of the years that were gone—­would have surrounded her with the material comforts to which, in her younger days, she had been accustomed.  The doctor knew that there was one—­a friend of her childhood, famous, now, in the world of books—­who would have come from the ends of the earth to care for her.  All that a human being could do for her, in those days of her life’s tragedy, that one had done.  Then—­because he understood—­he had gone away.  Her own son did not know—­could not, in his young manhood, have understood, if he had known—­would not understand when he came.  Perhaps, some day, he would understand—­perhaps.