“Thou art so good to spend thy time on me thus. But thy wife. Will she not be jealous?” He stared, bewildered by her strange, eery moments. “Jealous of thee!” he murmured. She took it in its contemptuous sense, and her white lips twitched. But she only said: “Is she aware thou hast come here?” He shrugged his shoulders. “Do I know? I have not told her.” “Tell her.” “As thou wishest.” There was a pause. Presently the woman spoke. “Wilt thou not bring her to see me? Then she will know that thou hast no love left for me.” He flinched as at a stab. After a painful moment he said, “Art thou in earnest?” “I am no marriage jester. Bring her to me. Will she not come to see an invalid? It is a Mitzvah [good deed] to visit the sick. It will wipe out her trespass.” “She shall come.” She came. Sarah stared at her for an instant with poignant curiosity; then her eyelids drooped to shut out the dazzle of her youth and freshness. Herzel’s wife moved awkwardly and sheepishly. But she was beautiful; a buxom, comely country girl from a Russian village, with a swelling bust and a cheek rosy with health and confusion. Sarah’s breast was racked by a thousand needles; but she found breath at last. “God bless--thee, Mrs.--Kretznow,” she said gaspingly. She took the girl’s hand. “How good thou art to come and see a sick creature!” “My husband willed it,” the new wife said, in clumsy deprecation. She had a simple, stupid air that did not seem wholly due to the constraint of the strange situation. “Thou wast right to obey. Be good to him, my child. For three years he waited on me, when I lay helpless. He has suffered much. Be good to him!” With an impulsive movement she drew the girl’s head down to her and kissed her on the lips. Then, with an anguished cry of “Leave me for to-day!” she jerked the blanket over her face and burst into tears. She heard the couple move hesitatingly away. The girl’s beauty shone on her through the opaque coverings. “O God!” she wailed, “God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, let me die now! For the merits of the patriarchs take me soon, take me soon!” Her vain, passionate prayer, muffled by the bedclothes, was wholly drowned by ear-piercing shrieks from the ward above--screams of agony mingled with half-articulate accusations of attempted poisoning--the familiar paroxysm of the palsied woman who clung to life. The thrill passed again through Sister Margaret. She uplifted her sweet, humid eyes. “Ah, Christ!” she whispered, “if I could die for her!” [Illustration] [Illustration] “HUMAN DOCUMENTS.” BIOGRAPHICAL NOTES.