“Go away!” came sternly from the wretched husband, who frowned darkly upon the girl thus audaciously disturbing his dying wife. And with a frightened face Gertie started to obey him, when the physician interposed and stopped her, saying: “Speak to her again.” His practised eye had detected a change in his patient when Gertie first spoke to her, and now, when at his command the silvery voice, so full of love and tender pathos, said, “I am here,—little Gertie. Do you know me, Mrs. Schuyler?” there certainly was a change, but whether from the effect of the powerful medicine given a few moments before as a last experiment, or because of that voice, which rang so clear and birdlike, I cannot tell. I only know something penetrated into the deep darkness, and brought back the senses almost gone forever. There was a fluttering of the eyelids; then they unclosed, and the eyes looked full at Gertie, while the lips whispered, “Stay!” and a hand moved slowly toward the child, who grasped it in her own, and held it fast, while Edith slept for a few moments. “She is better,—she will live,” the doctor said, as he met her look of recognition when her sleep was over. “Quiet now is what she needs.” And then Gertie started to leave the room, but the white fingers closed tightly round hers, and seeing that, Colonel Schuyler bade her stay. So Gertie stayed that afternoon, and sat by Edith’s side, and smoothed the tangled hair and bathed the pale forehead, and held the cooling drink to the parched lips; and once when the baby cried in the next room she went and took it up, and, soothing it into quiet, laid it back upon its dainty bed. Gertie was a natural nurse, and she covered herself with so much glory that day at Schuyler Hill that the colonel himself unbent to her, and sent her home in his carriage because of a rain which was falling, and asked her to come again. And Gertie went often during the weeks of Edith’s illness, and the sick woman felt better and happier when Gertie was in the room beside her, where she could look at her and touch her if she chose. There had been consciousness for half an hour or more after the birth of her child, but instead of joy that “a man was born into the world,” there had swept over her a wave of bitter anguish as she remembered the home in Dorset Street, and the other little one, of whom Colonel Schuyler never heard, and whose father slept under the evergreen which she could see from her window nodding in the autumn wind, and bending toward her as it seemed in an attitude of menace.