Fanny’s illness leads to her father’s repentance

From the grassy hillside and bright green plains of Kentucky the frosts of winter were gone.  By the dancing brook and in the shady nooks of the quiet valleys, the warm spring sun had sought out and brought to life thousands of sweet wild blossoms, which in turn had faded away, giving place to other flowers of a brighter and gayer hue.

Each night from the upper balcony of her father’s handsome dwelling Fanny watched in vain for the coming of Dr. Lacey, whose promised return had long been delayed by the dangerous illness of his father.  Over the wooded hills the breath of summer was floating, hot, arid and laden with disease.  Death was abroad in the land, and as each day exaggerated rumors of the havoc made by cholera in the sultry climate of Louisiana reached Fanny, fearful misgivings filled her mind lest Dr. Lacey, too, should fall a victim to the plague.

For herself she had no fears, though slowly but surely through her veins the fever flame was creeping, scorching her blood, poisoning her breath and burning her cheek, until her father, alarmed at her altered and languid appearance, inquired for the cause of the change.  “Nothing but a slight headache,” was the reply.

Next to the cholera, Mr. Middleton most feared the typhoid fever, several cases of which had recently occurred in the neighborhood, and fearing lest the disease might be stealing upon his darling, he proposed calling the physician.  But this Fanny would not suffer, and persisted in saying that she was well, until at last she lay all day upon the sofa, and Aunt Katy, when her favorite herb teas failed of effecting their wonted cure, shook her head, saying, “I knew ’twould be so.  I always telled you we couldn’t keep her long.”

Dr. Gordon was finally called and pronounced her disease to be typhoid in its worst form.  Days went by, and so rapid was the progress of the fever that Mr. Middleton trembled lest of him it had been decreed:  “He shall be childless.”  To Fanny the thought of death was familiar.  For her it had no terrors, and as her outward strength decayed, her faith in the Eternal grew stronger and brighter, yet she could not die without an assurance that again in the better world she would meet the father she so much loved.  For her mother she had no fears, for during many years she had been a patient, self-denying Christian.

At first Mr. Middleton listened in silence to Fanny’s gentle words of entreaty, but when she spoke to him of her own death, and the love which alone could sustain him then, he clasped her tightly to his heart, as if his arm alone could keep her there forever, saying, “Oh, no, you must not tell me that; you will not die.  Even now you are better.”  And the anxious father did try to deceive himself into the belief that Fanny was better, but when each morning’s light revealed some fresh ravage the disease had made—­when the flush on her