Poor George Campbell! To have seen the look on his face when he heard this dreadful piece of news you would not have imagined that he could have had so hard an opinion of his little brother as he had been trying to show for the last hour. He jumped from the table, and made a dash for the door before Joe had finished his panting sentences, but paused with the door in his hand to say: “O, boys! it isn’t half of it true—what I have been telling you; I have been worse than Davie every time. If I hadn’t laughed at him, and teased him, and made fun of him, he never would have got angry at me. O, boys! if he dies it will kill me.” Then he ran. What hours those were which followed, while the little brother lay on his bed, moaning steadily, but unconscious, so the doctors declared, and they shook their heads gravely in answer to questions, and would not give one ray of hope that he might by and by open his eyes and know them. Truth to tell, they thought he was going to die, and that very soon. But doctors are sometimes mistaken, and these were. Davie did not die; he lay day after day moaning with pain, not knowing any of the dear friends who bent over him; staring at George with wild, unnatural eyes, as if he were some comical object, instead of the brother who hovered about him, longing, oh! so eagerly for just one glance of recognition. There came a day when the doctors said it was possible—just barely possible—that Davie might awaken from the long sleep into which he had fallen, and know his friends. How still they kept the house, and how silently the mother sat hour after hour by his bedside, relieved only by the little sister, who came on tiptoe to take her place, that she might go out and drink a cup of tea to help her bear the nervous strain. Even then she only went into the next room, separated from Davie’s by a curtain, and came back when she had got half-way across the room because she thought she heard a sound behind those curtains. There was no sound; Jennie was sitting quietly at her post, a wise little nurse; she held up a warning hand, ready to motion anybody back into silence who might be tiptoeing toward them. She had imagined it was George, for he, poor fellow, hovered near, looking almost as pale and worn as the boy with his head on the pillow. Terrible days these had been to George. He was not sure that he ever prayed in his life before, but during those days he prayed with terrible earnestness, that Davie might not go away with those last words of his ringing in his ears. “If he could only know me long enough for me to ask him to forgive me!” said poor George to himself, while the tears rolled down his cheeks. “Then I think I would be almost willing to have him die. O, God! let me just tell him that I am sorry, and that I will not remember him in any such way, but I will think of the thousands of good and loving things he has done for me.” [Illustration: AT PONT NEUF.]