“Who is it, Muddie?” she questioned in an awed whisper.

The anxiety in the widow’s face gave place to a look of exaltation which fairly transfigured her.  Her deep eyes shone with the hoarded love for the son so long denied her.  She gathered her little daughter to her breast and kissed her tenderly.

“It is your brother, darling,” she gently said.  “God has given me a son!”

Well she knew that he was not yet entirely her own—­that she would have to wrestle fiercely with Death for his possession.  But she had made up her mind that she would win the battle.

“Death shall not have him,” she passionately told herself.

But the next moment, overwhelmed with a realization of human helplessness, she was upon her knees at his bedside, crying: 

“Oh, God, do not let him die!  I have but just found him!  Spare him to me now, if but a little while!”

CHAPTER XIX.

For many days the sick man lay with eyes closed in uneasy sleep or open, but unseeing, and with body writhing and tongue loosed but incoherent, showing that these half-waking hours, as well as the sleeping ones, were “horror haunted.”

Finally the most terrible of dreams visited him.  The circumstances of his life had caused him from his infancy to dwell much upon the subject of death.  He had oftentimes taken a gruesome pleasure in trying to imagine all the sensations of the grim passage into the “Valley of the Shadow”—­even to the closing of the coffin-lid and the descent into the grave.  Now, in his fever-dream, the dreadful details and sensations imagined in health came to him, but with tenfold vividness.  At the point when in the blackness and suffocation of conscious burial horror had reached its extremest limit and the sufferer was upon the verge of real death from sheer terror, relief came.  He seemed to feel himself freed from the closeness, the maddening fight for breath, of the coffin, and gently, surely, borne upward out of the abyss ... upward ... upward ... into air—­light—­life!

For a long while he lay quite still, too exhausted to move hand or foot—­to raise his eyelids even; but content—­more—­happy, perfectly happy, in the glorious consciousness of being able just to lie still and breathe the sweet air of day.

Presently, as he began to feel rested, the great grey eyes opened.  For the first time since the conqueror, Fever, had overthrown him and bound him to the uneasy bed of straw, they were clear as the sky after a storm—­swept clean of every cob-web cloud; but their lucid depths were filled with surprise, for they opened upon a cool, light, homelike chamber.  The walls around him were white, but were relieved here and there by restful prints in narrow black frames.  The four-post bed upon which he lay was canopied and the large, bright windows were curtained with snowiest dimity, but the draperies of both were drawn and he could