“I can not find the doctor,” Flossy had reported in despair.  “He has gone to Mayville, but Mr. Roberts will be here in a minute with a remedy, and he is going right over to Mayville for the doctor.”

“Don’t let him, I beg,” said Marion, who was herself again.  “There is nothing more formidable than a spoonful of your hair-oil.  I don’t know but the poor child needs an emetic to get rid of that.  Eurie, my dear, can’t you impress it on those dear people that we don’t want any hot water?  I hear the fourth pail coming.”

It was midnight before this excited group settled down into anything like quiet.  But the strain had been so great, and the relief so complete, that a sleep so heavy that it was almost a stupor at last held the tired workers.

Now, what of it all?  Why did this foolish mistake of bottles, which might have been a tragedy, and was nothing but a causeless excitement, reach so far with its results?

Let me tell you of one to whom sleep did not come.  That was the one who but half an hour before had believed herself face to face with death!  What mattered it to her that it was a mistake, and death no nearer to her, so far as she knew, than to the rest of the sleeping world?

Death was not annihilated—­he was only held at bay.  She knew that he would come, and that there would be no slipping away when his hand actually grasped hers.  She believed in death; she had supposed herself being drawn into his remorseless grasp.  To her the experience, so far as it had led her, was just as real as though there had been no mistake.

And the result? She had been afraid!  All her proper resolutions, so fresh in her mind, made only that very afternoon, had been of no more help to her than so much foam.  She had not so much as remembered in her hour of terror whether there was a church to join.  But that there was a God, and a judgment, and a Savior, who was not hers, had been as real and vivid as she thinks it ever can be, even when she stands on the very brink.

Oh, that long night of agony! when she tossed and turned and sought in vain for an hour of rest.  She was afraid to sleep.  How like death this sleeping was!  Who could know, when they gave themselves up to the grasp of this power, that he was not the very death angel himself in disguise, and would give them no earthly awakening forever?

What should she do?  Believe in religion?  Yes.  She knew it was true.  What then?  What had Marion said?  Was that all true?  Aye, verily it was; she knew that, too.  Had she not stood side by side with death?

The hours went by and the conflict went on.  There was a conflict.  Her conscience knew much more than her tongue had given it credit for knowing that afternoon.  Oh, she had seen Christians who had done more than join the church!  She had imagined that that act might have a mysterious and gradual change on her tastes and feelings, so that some time in her life, when she was old, and the seasons for her were over, she might feel differently about a good many things.