Coming softly to the door, the doctor looked in through the iron lattice, saw the figure of the nurse kneeling on the sanded floor, with her bronzed head close to the pillow where the moaning victim’s lay; and involuntarily he took off his cloth cap, and bowed his gray head to listen to the brief but solemn petition that went up from the dungeon to the supreme and unerring Judge.

When he returned to the same spot an hour later, Beryl sat on the side of the cot, with one hand clasping the brown wrist thrown across her lap, the other pressed gently over the sufferer’s hot, aching eyes; and wonderfully sweet was the rich voice that chanted low: 

     “Just as I am, without one plea,
      But that Thy blood was shed for me. 
      And that Thou bidd’st me come to Thee,
      O Lamb of God!  I come, I come! 
      Just as I am, and waiting not
      To rid my soul of one dark blot,
      To Thee, whose blood can cleanse each spot,
      O Lamb of God!  I come, I come!”

The noon sun was shining over a wet world, kindling into diamonds the crystal fringe of rain drops hanging from the green lances of willows, where a tufted red bird arched his scarlet throat in madrigal—­when four men lifted a cot, and bore it with its apparently dying burden to a spot upon which the warm light fell in a golden flood.

Between the Destroying Angel and his gasping prey, stepped two, anointed with the chrism of the Priesthood of Cure; and undismayed by the strident, sibilant, fitful breath that distorted the blue lips of the victim, they parried the sweep of the scythe of death, with the tiny, glittering steel blade surgery cunningly fashions; and through its silver canula, tracheotomy recalled the vanishing spirit, triumphantly renewed the lease of life.

At sunset on the same day, Beryl followed the warden to the door of the large hospital.

“Of all pitiful sights here, this has harrowed me the most.  The doctors did all they could, and the chaplain worked hard to save her soul, but she was like flint, till just before the end, when she raised up, and heard her child crying down in the work-room, where it had been put to sleep.  We could scarcely hold her; she fought like a panther to get out of bed, till the blood gushed from her nose, and though she could not speak plainly, she pointed, and we made out:  ‘Baby—­Dovie’.  The doctor would not consent that we should expose the child to the risk, but I could not hold out against that poor creature’s pleading wild eyes, so I just brought the little one.  What a strangling cry she gave, when I put it in her arms, and how the tears poured!  She was almost gone, and we saw that she wanted to tell us something about the child, but we could not understand.  The doctor put a pencil in her hand, and held a sheet of paper before her, and she tried to scrawl her wishes, but all we can read is:  ’Her father won’t ever own her.  Baptize—­her Dovie—­Eve