No winter could set a barrier across these pine-wood paths. When the whole country about lay blocked and drifted, and half buried with snow, all these spicy foot-roads were kept clear and level, and ready for Annie's feet. Whole days of George Ware's strength went into the work and the joy of doing this. In open spaces where the snow had drifted deep, he wrought it into solid walls almost as high on either hand as Annie's head. In dark nooks, where the spreading pines and hemlocks lay low and wide, he tossed the snow into fantastic and weird masses on the right and left, and cleared great spaces where he knew the partridge-berry would be ready with a tiny scarlet glow to light up the spot. This was George Ware's wooing. It never stepped into the glare, the contention of profaner air. It was not a seeking, a finding, a conquest; but a slow, sure growth of possession, which had as eternal foundation and seemed as eternally safe as the results of organic law. George's picture hung in Annie's room, opposite the foot of her bed. Opposite the foot of the bed in her mother's room hung a large engraving of the Sistine Madonna. I fancied that in Annie's quieter moments her eyes rested with a troubled look upon this picture, and one day, when she was in a deep sleep, I exchanged the pictures. I felt as if even lifeless canvas which had George's face painted upon it, might work her good. At last there came a night,--they said it was the fourteenth, but the words conveyed no meaning to me,--there came a night when Dr. Fearing, who had been sitting by Annie's bed for two hours, watching her every breath, sprang suddenly to his feet, and beckoned to my aunt and me to follow him into the next room. He shut the door, walked very swiftly up to us, looked first into her face then into mine; then felt her pulse, and then mine, and then turning to me, said,-- "It will have to be you." We looked at him in sudden terror. The tears were rolling down his wrinkled cheeks. "What is it, William?" gasped Aunt Ann. "It will have to be you," he went on, looking me in the face, and taking no notice of her question; "your pulse can be trusted. There has been a change. When Annie wakes out of this sleep she will know you. It may be in two hours, and it may not be for six. But if in that first moment she is alarmed, or agitated in any way, she will die." "O William, let me stay. I will be calm," moaned my poor aunt. Then I observed, for the first time, that she had called him "William." And then, for the first and last time, I heard Dr. Fearing call my Aunt Ann "darling," and I remembered in that instant that it had been said once in my hearing, that it was because of his love for Mrs. Henry Ware that Dr. William Fearing had lived and would die a lonely man.