“Then she is safe in Heaven, and there are no tears there; no broken hearts, or weary hours of watching. We’ll try to meet her some day. You did right to seek her out. You could not help her dying. She might have died had she been your wife, so, I’d try to think it happened for the best, and you’ll soon get to believing it did. That’s my experience. You are young yet, only twenty-six, and life has much in store for you. You’ll find some one to fill Lily’s place; some one whom we shall all think worthy of you, and we’ll be so happy together.” The Doctor did not reply to this but sat as if lost in painful thought, until he heard the clock strike the hour of midnight. “I did not think it was so late,” he exclaimed. “I must really leave you now.” Anna would not keep him longer, and with a kiss she sent him away, herself holding the door a little ajar to see what effect the new carpet would have upon him. It did not have any at first, so much was he absorbed in thinking of _Lily_, but he noticed it at last, admiring its pattern and having a pleasant consciousness that every thing in his room was in keeping, from the handsome drapery which shaded the windows to the marble hearth on which a fire was blazing. He could afford to have a fire, and he sat enjoying it, thinking far different thoughts from Hugh Worthington, who, in his scantily furnished room, sat, with a curl of golden hair upon the stand beside him, and a well worn Bible in his hand. Dr. Richards had no Bible of his own; he did not read it now—had never read it much, but somehow his talk with Anna had carried him back to the time when just to please his Lily he had said with her the Lord’s Prayer, kneeling at her side with his arm around her girlish form. He had not said it since, and he never would again, he thought. It was sheer nonsense, asking not to be led into temptation, as if God delighted to lead us there. It was just fit for weak women to believe, though now that Lily was dead and gone he was glad that she had believed it, and he felt that she was better off for having said those prayers and acted up to what she said. “Poor Lily,” he kept repeating to himself, while in his dreams that night there were visions of a lonely grave in a secluded part of Greenwood, and he heard again the startling words, “Dead, both she and the child.” He did not know there was a child, and he staggered in his sleep, just as he staggered down the creaking stairs, repeating to himself, “Lily’s child—Lily’s child! May Lily’s God forgive me!” CHAPTER VI. ALICE JOHNSON.