Unknown to herself, she was watched by one who scarcely dared to breathe lest what seemed a vision should vanish.  The dying man was Vinton Arnold.  His married sister, overcome by weariness and the stupor of sleep, had inadvertently forgotten to mention his name, and Mildred was under the impression that the name of her patient was Sheppard.  She had never been within the Arnold mansion, nor was she specially familiar with its exterior.  Entering it hastily on a stormy night, she had not received the faintest suggestion that it was the home to which she and her mother had once dreamed she might be welcomed.

When at last Arnold had awakened, he saw dimly, sitting by the fire, an unfamiliar form, which nevertheless suggested the one never absent from his thoughts.  Noiselessly he pushed the lace curtain aside, and to his unspeakable wonder his eyes seemed to rest on Mildred Jocelyn.  “She is dead,” he first thought, “and it is her spirit.  Or can it be that my reason is leaving me utterly, and the visions of my tortured mind are becoming more real than material things?  Oh, see,” he murmured, “there are tears in her eyes.  I could almost imagine that a good angel had taken her guise and was weeping over one so lost and wrecked as I am.  Now her lips move—­she is speaking softly to herself.  Great God! can it be real?  Or is it that my end is near, and long-delayed mercy gives me this sweet vision before I die?”

His sombre and half-superstitious conjectures were almost dispelled by a little characteristic act on Mildred’s part—­an act that contained a suggestion of hope for Roger.  In awakening the stronger traits of manhood in the latter she had also evoked an appreciation of beauty and a growing love for it.  Mildred was human enough not to regret that this developing sense should find its fullest gratification in herself.  Though so determined to become a wrinkled spinster, she found a secret and increasing pleasure in the admiring glances that dwelt upon her face and dainty figure, and this fact might have contained for him, had he known it, a pleasing hint.  It must be confessed that she no longer wished to go into his presence without adding a little grace to her usually plain attire; and now that she was thinking so deeply of him she involuntarily raised her hand to adjust her coquettish nurse’s cap, which by some feminine magic all her own she ever contrived to make a becoming head-dress rather than a badge of office.

Even to Vinton Arnold’s perturbed and disordered mind the act was so essentially feminine and natural, so remote from ghostly weirdness, that he raised himself on his elbow and exclaimed, “Millie, Millie Jocelyn!”

“Ah,” cried Mildred starting from her chair and looking fearfully toward the half-closed door of Mrs. Sheppard’s room.  In her turn her heart beat quickly, with the sudden superstitious fear which the strongest of us cannot control when we seem close to the boundaries of the unseen world.  “It was his voice,” she murmured.