In Frankfort he had heard that Fanny could not live, and now he eagerly asked, “Tell me, Mrs. Miller, is she yet alive?”

Kate replied by leading him directly toward the sick chamber.  As he entered the room Uncle Joshua burst into a fresh flood of tears, saying as he took the doctor’s offered hand, “Poor boy!  Poor George.  You’re losing a great deal, but not as much as I, for you can find another Fanny, but for me thar’s no more Sunshine, when they carry her away.”

Dr. Gordon now came and after feeling her pulse and listening to the sound of her breathing, he said, “When she wakes from this sleep, I think the matter will be decided.  She will be better or worse.”

And he was right, although the old clock in the hall told the hour of midnight ere she roused from the deep slumber which had seemed so much like the long last sleep of death.  Her first words were for “water, water,” and as she put up her hand to take the offered glass, Dr. Gordon whispered to Dr. Lacey:  “She is better, but must not see you tonight.”

In a twinkling Mr. Middleton’s large hand was laid on Dr. Lacey’s shoulder, and hurrying him into the adjoining room, he said, “Stay here till mornin’, and neither breathe nor stir!”

Dr. Lacey complied with the request as far as it was possible, though never seemed a night so long, and never dawned a morning so bright as did the succeeding one, when through the house the joyous tidings ran that the crisis was past, and Fanny would live.

In the course of the morning, Fanny asked Kate, who alone was attending her, if Dr. Lacey were not there?

“What makes you think so?” asked Kate.

“Because,” answered Fanny, “I either heard him or dreamed that I did.”

“And if he is here, could you bear to see him now?”

“Oh, yes, yes,” was the eager answer, and the next moment Dr. Lacey was by her side.

Intuitively Kate left the room, consequently we have no means of knowing what occurred during that interview, when Dr. Lacey, as it were, received back from the arms of death his Fanny, whose recovery from that time was sure though slow.  Mr. Middleton, in the exuberance of his joy at having his Sunshine restored, seemed hardly sane, but frequently kept muttering to himself, “Yes, yes, I remember—­I’ll do it, only give me a little time”; at the same time his elbow moved impatiently, as if nudging off some unseen visitor.  What it was that he remembered and would do, was not known for several days and then he informed his wife that when at first he feared that Fanny should not live, he had racked his brain to know why this fresh evil was brought upon him, and had concluded that it was partly to punish him for his ill-treatment of Julia when living, and partly because that now she was dead he had neglected to purchase for her any gravestones.  “And I promised,” said he, “that if she was spar’d, I’d buy as nice a gravestun as I would if ’twas Sunshine.”  Three weeks from that time there stood by the mound in the little graveyard a plain, handsome monument, on which was simply inscribed, “Julia, aged twenty.”