He was helpless as an infant, and Annie nursed him much as she would have nursed a baby whose life hung on a thread. He had been there four days, and only a faint, moaning sound had given token of life or consciousness. But at the close of the fourth day, as Annie sat chafing the pulseless fingers where the grey skin hung so loosely, the eyes opened for a moment and were fixed upon her face. There was no consciousness in them,—no recognition of her presence, nothing but the strained, hungry, despairing look Annie had seen in the eyes of so many of our prisoners, and which to a greater or less degree was peculiar to them all. Annie saw this look, and then underneath it all she saw something more,—_what_ it was she could not tell, but it brought back to her those moonlight nights upon the beach at New London, and that other night of more recent date, when she sat with Jimmie Carleton beneath the Rockland sky and heard his passionate words of love, and saw his soft, black eyes kindle with earnestness and then grow sad and sorrowful with disappointment. There was no kindling in them now,—no ardent passion or heat of love,—but a certain softness and brightness, and even sauciness, lingered still and told Annie at last who it was. “Oh, merciful Father! it is _Jimmie_!” she said, and unmindful of any who might be looking on, she bent down and kissed the sunken cheeks from which the flesh was gone. She had expected him so long, and grown so weary and hopeless with expectations unfulfilled, that she could scarcely believe it now, or realize that the half dead wretch before her was once the lively, humorous, teasing Jimmie Carleton. How she pitied him, and how her heart throbbed as she thought of the suffering he must have endured ere he reached this state of apparent imbecility. Then, as she remembered what the physician said about his mind, she dropped upon her knees, and clasping her hands over her face, prayed earnestly that God would remove the darkness and wholly restore the man whom she loved so dearly. “_Do_ you think he will die?” she asked Mrs. Simms, who had come for a moment to her side. “You know him, then. I was wondering that an old woman like me should see clearer than you. I mistrusted from the first,” Mrs. Simms answered, and then to Annie’s eager questioning she replied, “It will be almost a miracle if we do get any sense into that brain, or flesh upon these bones, but we’ll do the best we can.”