"The doctors give little hope. The paralytic stroke is spreading upward to his face. If death spares him, he will live a helpless man. I shall take care of him to the last. As for you--forget him." Mrs. Zant gave the note to Mr. Rayburn. "Read it, and destroy it," she said. "It is written in ignorance of the terrible truth." He obeyed--and looked at her in silence, waiting to hear more. She hid her face. The few words she had addressed to him, after a struggle with herself, fell slowly and reluctantly from her lips. She said: "No mortal hand held the hands of John Zant. The guardian spirit was with me. The promised protection was with me. I know it. I wish to know no more." Having spoken, she rose to retire. He opened the door for her, seeing that she needed rest in her own room. Left by himself, he began to consider the prospect that was before him in the future. How was he to regard the woman who had just left him? As a poor creature weakened by disease, the victim of her own nervous delusion? or as the chosen object of a supernatural revelation--unparalleled by any similar revelation that he had heard of, or had found recorded in books? His first discovery of the place that she really held in his estimation dawned on his mind, when he felt himself recoiling from the conclusion which presented her to his pity, and yielding to the nobler conviction which felt with her faith, and raised her to a place apart among other women. XIV. THEY left St. Sallins the next day. Arrived at the end of the journey, Lucy held fast by Mrs. Zant's hand. Tears were rising in the child's eyes. "Are we to bid her good-by?" she said sadly to her father. He seemed to be unwilling to trust himself to speak; he only said: "My dear, ask her yourself." But the result justified him. Lucy was happy again. MISS MORRIS AND THE STRANGER. I. WHEN I first saw him, he was lost in one of the Dead Cities of England--situated on the South Coast, and called Sandwich. Shall I describe Sandwich? I think not. Let us own the truth; descriptions of places, however nicely they may be written, are always more or less dull. Being a woman, I naturally hate dullness. Perhaps some description of Sandwich may drop out, as it were, from my report of our conversation when we first met as strangers in the street. He began irritably. "I've lost myself," he said. "People who don't know the town often do that," I remarked. He went on: "Which is my way to the Fleur de Lys Inn?" His way was, in the first place, to retrace his steps. Then to turn to the left. Then to go on until he found two streets meeting. Then to take the street on the right. Then to look out for the second turning on the left. Then to follow the turning until he smelled stables--and there was the inn. I put it in the clearest manner, and never stumbled over a word. "How the devil am I to remember all that?" he said.