Poor Harry! they never spoke to each other, these women who watched him; but Agnes and Rose perceived when they approached the bed that it was only a strong self-restraint which prevented Martha from thrusting them away. She was jealous now, even of them--she could not bear to see him touched by any hand but her own--as if it was her hand alone which could touch him without inflicting pain; and they saw her shiver when the surgeon drew near him, as if with bodily fear. And sometimes, when Martha laid Agnes down upon the sofa in this sad sick room, and covered her tenderly as if she were a child, an hour of feverish sleep would fall upon the little wife; and Rose, when sent to her own room for the night, after lingering at the door, and wandering up and down to see if anything could possibly be wanted which was not ready, would weep herself into a trance of slumber, from which the awakening was bitter--but Martha never slept. And Harry lay upon his bed, unconscious, and never said a word which testified that he knew them there. Conscious of pain--conscious of the agony of being touched or moved, which drew from him those shrill cries and heavy moanings--and with dim, dreamy eyes, which seemed to recognize sometimes where it was he lay, as they wandered over the well-known furniture; but though he spoke of them all in his times of greater ease, and addressed them by loving names, which brought a swooning deadly sickness over Agnes, and convulsed Martha with a terrible tenderness, he never spoke to them as present beside him; wandering, broken lines of thought, strange visible associations which connected one distant thing with another, came from him in an interrupted flow--and sometimes strange half-dreaming prayers, exclaimed vehemently at one time, at another repeated with a placid smile like a child’s--“Lead us not into temptation--deliver us from evil,” made up the prolonged and audible reverie of Harry’s stricken soul. On the morning of the third day, while Martha sat beside him on one side, and Agnes, with her face buried in the coverlet, knelt by the bed, silently praying and weeping, on the other, a gradual awakening came to Harry’s face. Martha, whose look never left it, saw the dreamy eyes light up, at first faintly, but gradually rising into life. Then he saw Agnes, and stealing his feeble hand along the bed, laid it on her head. She started up with a faint cry, and Harry’s trance was broken. “Am I to die?” he said, in a whisper, when for some moments they had held his hands in silence--his hands, one of which was bathed in the tears of Agnes, while on the other had fallen a single great burning drop, falling from Martha’s heavy eyelid, like a drop of living fire. But no answer came to him, except the convulsive sobs of Agnes, and a tightened and clinging pressure of the hand which lay in Martha’s grasp.