"Now she will sleep. Mr. Vincent, I congratulate you on having such pure blood in your veins; not robust, you know, but far better--such sweet, perfect health as one rarely meets with nowadays," said the doctor, under his breath, with professional enthusiasm; "all the better for your sister that she came of such a stock. My wife, now, is another example--not robust, as I say--natures delicately organised, but in such exquisite adjustment, and with such elasticity! Mrs. Vincent will go to sleep like a baby, and wake able for--anything that God may please to send her," said Dr. Rider with reverence. "They will both sleep till to-morrow if all goes well. Hush!-- Well, I may be absurd, for neither of them could hear us here; but still it is best to err on the safe side." "But Susan--you are not deceiving us--Susan is----" said Vincent, with sudden alarm. "She is asleep," said Dr. Rider; "and, if I can, I will remain till she wakes; it is life or death." They parted thus--the doctor to the little room below-stairs, where Vincent's dinner awaited him, and the young minister himself to his own room, where he went into the darkness with a kind of bewildered uncertainty and incomprehension of the events about him. To think that this day, with all its strange encounters and unexpected incidents, was Sunday, as he suddenly remembered it to be--that this morning he had preached, and this evening had to preach again, completed in Vincent's mind the utter chaos and disturbance of ordinary life. It struck him dumb to remember that by-and-by he must again ascend the pulpit, and go through all his duties. Was he an impostor, doing all this mechanically? He debated the question dully in his own mind, as he sat too much bewildered to do anything else in the dark in his bed-chamber, pondering with a certain confused gravity and consolation over all that had happened. But faculties, which are confused by sudden comfort and relief, are very different from faculties obscured and confounded by suffering. He sat vaguely in the dark, wondering over his strange position. This morning, even in the height of his despair, he had at least some idea what he was going to do in that pulpit of Salem. It was a sacrifice--a martyrdom to accomplish--a wild outcry and complaint to pour forth to the world. This evening he sat wasting the precious moments in the soft darkness, without knowing a word of what he was to say--without being able to realise the fact, that by-and-by he should have to go out through the sharp air echoing with church-bells--to see once more all those watchful faces turned upon him, and to communicate such instruction as was in him to his flock. A sense of exhaustion and satisfaction was in Vincent's heart. He sat listless in a vague comfort and weariness, his head throbbing with the fumes of his past excitement, yet not aching. It was only now that he realised the rolling off from his head of this dark cloud of horror and shame. Susan was