“And yet he is only one among thousands and thousands who have perished like him, in the flower of their youth. Oh, this war! this war!” she sighed. Then she looked down upon her own patient. He was sleeping peacefully under the influence of the opiate. The hours passed quietly on towards midnight. Elfie with her hand held prisoner the hand of her patient, and her head resting on the edge of his pillow, fell asleep. The nurse passing softly on her rounds of inspection, paused to gaze on this scene, the poor mutilated man and his weary wife, both sleeping so peacefully, and so unconscious of the danger that was evident to the nurse’s experience. “Poor things,” she murmured, “let them sleep while they may.” Elfie slept several hours. When she awoke it was near day. She looked at her little watch and saw that it was four o’clock in the morning. Her patient was still sleeping very calmly, although she had, on waking up, unconsciously drawn her hand from his. “Oh, he is a great deal better! a great deal better! He will be sure to get well!” said Elfie, gazing with satisfaction and thankfulness upon the calmly sleeping face. She bathed her own eyes and temples from a little pocket flacon of cologne water to wake herself up more effectually, and then she sat cheerfully watching for the dawn, and frequently looking down upon the face of her patient. An hour more had passed when, looking upon Goldsborough’s face, she fancied that it had changed, and grown paler and more sunken. While gazing intently, to be sure she was right, she became sensible of a sound of dull, soft trickling and dropping. Thinking of nothing but that her jug might be leaking and her lemonade wasting, she hastily arose to examine; and her eyes fell upon a sight that made her senses reel: beside the bed was a crimson pool formed from a stream of blood that trickled and dropped from under the counterpane. In an instant Elfie knew what had happened. The hemorrhage had broken out again, and the patient was fast bleeding to death in his opium sleep. Suppressing the scream that arose to her lips, Elfie flew noiselessly down the ward to the spot where the nurses and night-watchers sat, and breathlessly told them of the fatality. One of the nurses hastened out to fetch a surgeon, and the other accompanied Elfie back to her patient. The woman immediately uncovered the stump of the mutilated limb, and placing her hand to the lips of the wound, pressed them together to stop the hemorrhage until the surgeon should arrive. The action awoke the sleeper. He gasped for breath and stared around him in bewilderment. Elfie was already by his side, with her hand in his. But his feeble hand had no longer the power to close on hers. He was dying fast. “What—has—happened?” he panted, turning his eyes, wild with the approaching struggle, up to the face of Elfie.