of all he bound up his own wound, from which had escaped a good deal beyond what he had used.  While thus occupied, he turned sick, and lay down on the floor.  Presently, however, he grew able to crawl from the room, and got into the garden at the back of the house, where he walked softly to the little rude arbor at the end of it, and sat down as if in a dream.  But in the dream his soul felt wondrously awake.  He had been tasting death from the same cup with the beautiful woman who lay there, coming alive with his life.  A terrible weight was heaved from his bosom.  If she had died, he would have felt, all his life long, that he had sent one of the loveliest of Nature’s living dreams back to the darkness and the worm, long years before her time, and with the foam of the cup of life yet on her lips.  Then a horror seized him at the presumptuousness of the liberty he had taken.  What if the beautiful creature would rather have died than have the blood of a man, one she neither loved nor knew, in her veins, and coursing through her very heart!  She must never know it.

“I am very grateful,” he said to himself; then smiled and wondered to whom he was grateful.

“How the old stamps and colors come out in the brain when one least expects it!” he said.  “What I meant was, How glad I am!”

Honest as he was, he did not feel called upon to examine whether glad was really the word to represent the feeling which the thought of what he had escaped, and of the creature he had saved from death, had sent up into his consciousness.  Glad he was indeed! but was there not mingled with his gladness a touch of something else, very slight, yet potent enough to make him mean grateful when the word broke from him? and if there was such a something, where did it come from?  Perhaps if he had caught and held the feeling, and submitted it to such a searching scrutiny as he was capable of giving it, he might have doubted whether any mother-instilled superstition ever struck root so deep as the depth from which that seemed at least to come.  I merely suggest it.  The feeling was a faint and poor one, and I do not care to reason from it.  I would not willingly waste upon small arguments, when I see more and more clearly that our paltriest faults and dishonesties need one and the same enormous cure.

But indeed never had Faber less time to examine himself than now, had he been so inclined.  With that big wound in it, he would as soon have left a shell in the lady’s chamber with the fuse lighted, as her arm to itself.  He did not leave the village all day.  He went to see another patient in it, and one on its outskirts, but he had his dinner at the little inn where he put up Ruber, and all night long he sat by the bedside of his patient.  There the lovely white face, blind like a statue that never had eyes, and the perfect arm, which now and then, with a restless, uneasy, feeble toss, she would fling over the counterpane, the arm he had to watch as the