“Tell me anything you wish.  I always have better thoughts and impulses after being with you.”

“Please don’t regard me as egotistical, or offend me by thinking I am trying to be better than others.  Why shouldn’t I help that poor girl?  We often dance all night for fun; why can’t we watch occasionally for pity?  And in simple truth it will be a long time before the ache for that poor creature will go out of my heart.  It came very close home, Graydon—­very close.  It brought to mind another girl, who was once scarcely stronger or better than Tilly Wendall is to-day, but God was kind.  Tilly also has great black eyes, and they do look so large and pathetic in the wan little face!  At first they did not notice me much.  I was only another of the watchers who had come to aid her mother.  It’s astonishing how kind these plain country people are to one another in trouble, and many a housewife in this region has toiled all day and then sat up with the poor child the livelong night.

“For the first few hours I could do little more than help her move in her weak restlessness, and give remedies to relieve her incessant cough.  The poor thing seemed neither more nor less than a victim of disease, that with a cruelty almost malign had tortured her.  I can’t explain how this awful impression grew upon me.  It was as if viewless, brutal hands had racked the emaciated form until intelligence was gone, and then, not content, would continue their vindictive work while breath remained in the body.  As my watch was prolonged this impression grew into a nightmare of horror.  The still house, the silent, white, beautiful world without, and that frail young girl tortured hour after hour under my eyes by fever and a convulsive, incessant, remorseless cough.”

She buried her face in her hands, and for a moment or two her voice was choked with sobs.

“Oh, Madge,” cried Graydon, almost fiercely, “you anger me!  I would strangle a man who harmed a hair of such a child’s head.  How can I worship a God who sends or permits such a thing?  You are braver than I. I could see a man shot, but I couldn’t look upon what you have described.  Yet the picture brings back the moment when we parted—­when you struggled feebly in my arms with a premonition of your almost mortal weakness, and then sank back white and deathlike.  If you had not made so wise and brave an effort you might have lingered on in torture like this poor girl.  You stood in just that peril, did you not?”

“I suppose I did.”

“Oh, what a clod I was!  I used to hear you cough night after night, and I would mutter, ‘Poor Madge!’ and go to sleep.  To think that you might have suffered as this girl is suffering!  I never realized it before, yet I thought I did.  I can’t tell you how my whole nature rebels at it all, and pious talk about resignation in the presence of such scenes fairly makes me grind my teeth;” and his brow blackened like night in his mental revolt, and his eyes were sternly fixed in honest, indignant arraignment of the Power he did not scruple to defy, though so impotent to resist.