“All right!  Here is another:  it is called the.  Now find it.”

Many times she went through the same process.  In his pride of teaching
Danby did not let his pupil flag.  When he was going she asked timidly,
“Shall you come again?”

“Of course I shall, Ignoramus, but don’t you forget your lesson.”

“No, no,” she answered brightening.  “I will think of it all the time I am asleep.”

“That is a good girl,” he said patronizingly, and bade her good-bye.

It was thus she learned to read, not remarkably well, but well enough to content Danby, which was sufficient to content Nellie also; and the ambitious boy was not satisfied until she could write as well.

An end came to this peaceful life when the youth left home for college.  The girl’s eyes seemed to grow larger from intense gazing at him during the last few weeks that preceded his departure, but that was her only expression of feeling.  The morning after he left, the nurse, not finding her appear at her usual time, went to her chamber to look for her.  She lay on the bed, as she had been lying all the night, sleepless, with pale face and red lips.  Nurse asked her what was the matter.

“Nothing,” was the reply.

“Come get up, Beauty,” coaxed the nurse.

But Nellie turned her face to the wall and did not answer.  She lay thus for a week, scarcely eating or sleeping, sick in mind and body, struggling with a grief that she hardly knew was grief.  At the end of that time she tottered from the bed, and, clothing herself with difficulty, crept to the library.

The instinct that sends a sick animal to the plant that will cure it seemed to teach Nellie where to find comfort.  Danby was gone, but memory remained, and the place where he had been was to her made holy and possessed healing power, as does the shrine of a saint for a believer.  Her shrine was the reading-desk, and the chair on which he had sat during those happy lessons.  To make all complete, she lifted the heavy book from the shelf and opened it at the page from which she had first learned.  She put herself in his chair and caressed the words with her thin hand, her fingers trembling over the place that his had touched, then dropping her head on the desk where his arm had lain, she smiling slept.

She awoke with the nurse looking down on her, saying, “Beauty, you are better.”

And so she was:  she drank the broth and ate the bread and grapes that had been brought her, and from that day grew stronger.  But the shadow in her eyes was deeper now, and the veins in her temples were bluer, as if the blood had throbbed and pained there.  Every morning found her at her post:  she had no need to roam the woods and fields now—­her world lay within her.  It was sad for one so young to live on memory.

For many days her page and these few words were sufficient to content her, and to recall them one after another, as Danby had taught, was her only occupation.  But by and by the words themselves began to interest her, then the context, and finally the sense dawned upon her—­dawned not less surely that it came slowly, and that she was now and then compelled to stop and think out a word.