She looked toward the gasping little town through the relentless noon. Her merciful blue eyes filled, but the man's look followed with a dry, exultant light. "There is no porter," he said, abruptly, glancing at her heavy bag and shawl-strap. "Would you permit me to help you?" "Oh, thank you!" replied Dr. Dare, heartily, relinquishing her burden. Plainly, this poor fellow was not a gentleman. The lady could afford to be kind to him. "I know nothing how we shall find it," she chatted, affably, "but I go to work to-night. I presume I shall need nurses before morning. I'll have your address." She took from her gray sacque pocket a physician's note-book, and stood, pencil in hand. "My name," he said, "is Hope--Zerviah Hope." She wrote without comment, walking as she wrote; he made no other attempt to converse with her. The two physicians followed, exchanging now and then a subdued word. The negro dragged himself wearily over the scorching sand, and thus the little procession of pity entered the town of Calhoun. My story does not deal with love or ladies. I have to relate no tender passages between the fever-physicians, volunteers from New York, for the afflicted region of Calhoun. Dr. Marian Dare came South to do a brave work, and I have no doubt she did it bravely, as a woman should. She came in pursuit of science, and I have no doubt she found it, as a woman will. Our chief interest in her at this time lies in the fact that certain missing fragments in the history of the person known as Zerviah Hope we owe to her. She hovers over the tale with a distant and beautiful influence, pervading as womanly compassion and alert as a woman's eye. I have nothing further to say about the story before I tell it, except that it is true. * * * * * That night, after the physicians had gone about their business, Zerviah Hope wandered, a little forlornly, through the wretched town. Scip, the negro boatman, found him a corner to spend the night. It was a passable place, but Hope could not sleep; he had already seen too much. His soul was parched with the thirst of sympathy. He walked his hot attic till the dawn came. As it grew brighter he grew calmer; and, when the unkindly sun burst burning upon the land, he knelt by his window and looked over the doomed town, and watched the dead-carts slinking away toward the everglades in the splendid color of the sky and air, and thought his own thoughts in his own way about this which he had come to do. We should not suppose that they were remarkable thoughts; he had not the look of a remarkable man. Yet, as he knelt there,--a sleepless, haggard figure blotted against the sunrise, with folded hands and moving lips,--an artist, with a high type of imagination and capable of spiritual discernment, would have found in him a design for a lofty subject, to which perhaps he would have given the name of "Consecration" rather than of "Renunciation," or of "Exultance" rather than of "Dread."