“Let me do something for you.  Shall I read to you, or sing you a hymn?” Her voice had often soothed and done him good.  “Tell me what I can do for you!”

The man smiled gratefully, then looked imploringly in her eyes, and said, “Dear Susan, go for me into the prison and pay Strutt and Robinson each a visit.  Strutt the longest, he is the oldest.  Poor things! they miss me sadly.”

Susan made no foolish objection.  She did what she was asked, and came back and told him all they had said and all she had said; and how kind everybody was to her in the prison; and how they had all asked how he was to-day.

“They are very good,” said he feebly.

Soon after he dosed; and Susan, who always wore a cheerful look to his face, could now yield to her real feelings.

She sat at some little distance from the bed and tried to work, and every now and then looked up to watch him, and again and again her eyes were blinded; and she laid down her work, for her heart said to her, “A few short days and you will see him no more.”

Mrs. Davies, too, was grave and sad.  She had made the house neat and clean from cellar to garret, and now he who should have enjoyed it lay there sick unto death.

“Susan,” said she, “I doubt I have been sent here to set his house in order against his—­”

“Oh! don’t tell me that,” cried Susan, and she burst into a fit of sobbing, for Mrs. Davies had harped her own fear.

“Take care, he is waking, Susan.  He must not see us.”

“Oh, no!” and the next moment she was by her patient’s side with a cheerful look and voice and manner well calculated to keep any male heart from sinking, sick or well.

Heavy heart and hopeful face! such a nurse was Susan Merton.  This kind deception became more difficult every day.  Her patient wasted and wasted; and the anxious look that is often seen on a death-stricken man’s face showed itself.  Mrs. Davies saw it and Susan saw it; but the sick man himself as yet had never spoken of his decease; and both Mrs. Davies and Susan often wondered that he did not seem to see his real state.

But one day it so happened that he was light-headed and greatly excited, holding a conversation.  His eye was flashing, and he spoke in bursts, and then stopped a while and seemed to be listening in irritation to some arguments with which he did not agree.  The enthusiast was building a prison in the air.  A prison with a farm, a school, and a manufactory attached.  Here were to be combined the good points of every system, and others of his own.

“Yes,” said he, in answer to his imaginary companion, “there shall be both separation and silence for those whose moral case it suits—­for all, perhaps, at first—­but not for all always.  Away with your Morrison’s pill-system; your childish monotony of moral treatment in cases varying and sometimes opposed.

“Yes, but I would.  I would allow a degree of intercourse between such as were disposed to confirm each other in good.  Watch them? why, of course—­and closely, too.