“Dear Lora, I am so glad to see you,” said the little girl, holding out her small, thin hand.

Lora took it and kissed it, saying, in a tremulous tone, “How ill you look!”

Elsie held up her face, and Lora stooped and kissed her lips; then bursting into tears and sobs, she ran out of the room.

“Oh, Adelaide!” she cried, rushing into her sister’s room, “how she is changed!  I should never have known her!  Oh! do you think she can ever get well?”

“If you had seen her two or three weeks ago, you would be quite encouraged by her appearance now,” replied her sister.  “The doctor considers her out of danger now, though he says she must have careful nursing; and that I assure you she gets from her father.  He seems to feel that he can never do enough for her, and won’t let me share the labor at all, although I would often be very glad to do it.”

“He ought to do all he can for her! he would be a brute if he didn’t, for it was all his doing, her being so ill!” exclaimed Lora indignantly.  “No, no; I ought not to say that,” she added, correcting herself immediately, “for we were all unkind to her; I as well as the rest.  Oh, Adelaide! what a bitter thought that was to me when I heard she was dying!  I never realized before how lovely, and how very different from all the rest of us she was.”

“Yes, poor darling! she has had a hard life amongst us,” replied Adelaide, sighing, while the tears rose to her eyes.  “You can never know, Lora, what an agonizing thought it was at the moment when I believed that she had left us forever.  I would have given worlds to have been able to live the last six years over again.  But Horace—­oh, Lora!  I don’t believe there was a more wretched being on the face of the earth than he!  I was very angry with him at first, but when I saw how utterly crushed and heartbroken he was, I couldn’t say one word.”

Adelaide was crying now in good earnest, as well as Lora.

Presently Lora asked for a full account of Elsie’s illness, which Adelaide was beginning to give, when a servant came to say that Elsie wanted to see her; so, with a promise to Lora to finish her story another time, she hastened to obey the summons.

She found the little girl still lying languidly in her father’s arms.

“Dear Aunt Adelaide,” she said, “I wanted to see you; you haven’t been in to-day to look at your little patient.”

Adelaide smiled, and patted her cheek.

“Yes, my dear,” she said, “I have been in twice, but found you sleeping both times, and your father keeping guard over you, like a tiger watching his cub.”

“No, no, Aunt Adelaide; papa isn’t a bit like a tiger,” said Elsie, passing her small, white hand caressingly over his face.  “You mustn’t say that.”

“I don’t know,” replied Adelaide, laughing and shaking her head; “I think anybody who should be daring enough to disturb your slumbers would find there was considerable of the tiger in him.”