There was a tremulous motion of the lids, a contracting of the muscles about the mouth, and then the eyes opened for a moment, but the stare he gave to Alice was wholly meaningless. He evidently had no thought of her presence, though he murmured the name “Golden Hair,” and then fell away again into the heavy stupor which continued all the day. Alice would not leave him. She had heard him say, “When she watches by me as perhaps she will, though I may not know her,” and that was sufficient to keep her at his side. She was accustomed to sickness, she said, and in spite of Aunt Eunice’s entreaties, she sat by his pillow, bathing his burning hands, holding the cooling ice upon his head, putting it to his lips, and doing those thousand little acts which only a kind womanly heart can prompt, and silently praying almost constantly as Hugh had said she must. There were others than Alice praying for Hugh that summer afternoon, for Muggins had gone from the brook to the cornfield, startling Adah with the story of Hugh’s sickness, and then launching out into a glowing description of the new miss, “with her white gownd and curls as long as Rocket’s tail.” “She talked with God, too,” she said, “like what you does, Miss Adah. She axes him to make Mas’r Hugh well, and He will, won’t He?” “I trust so,” Adah answered, her own heart going silently up to the Giver of life and health, asking, if it were possible, that her noble friend might be spared. Old Sam, too, with streaming eyes stole out to his bethel by the spring, and prayed for the dear “Massah Hugh” lying so still at Spring Bank, and insensible to all the prayers going up in his behalf. How terrible that deathlike stupor was, and the physician, when later in the afternoon he came again, shook his head sadly. “I’d rather see him rave till it took ten men to hold him,” he said, feeling the wiry pulse which were now beyond his count. “Is there nothing that will rouse him?” Alice asked, “no name of one he loves more than another?” The doctor answered “no; love for woman-kind, save as he feels it for his mother or his sister, is unknown to Hugh Worthington.” But Alice did not think so. The only words he had whispered since she sat there, together with Muggins’ story of the Bible and the curl, would indicate that far down in Hugh’s heart, where the world had never seen, there was hidden a mighty, undying love for some one. How she wished they were alone, that she might whisper, that name in his ear, but with the doctor there, and Aunt Eunice and Densie close at hand, she dared not, lest she should betray the secret she had no right to possess. “I’ll speak to him of his mother,” she said, and moistening with ice the lips which were now of a purple hue she said to him softly, “Mr. Worthington.” “Call him Hugh,” Aunt Eunice whispered, and Alice continued, “Hugh, do you know I’m speaking to you?”