Poor fellow! he lay, with closed eyes, wan and weary, on his bed, looking, at that moment, like anything rather than like a successful soldier; but he lifted his head as he caught the noise of the door creaking on its hinges, and his face brightened into an expression of joy and gratitude pleasant to behold when he discovered Mrs. Netterville standing on the threshold. "Can you ever forgive me?" she said, going up to him at once. "I cannot easily forgive myself for having left you so long alone. In the grief and anguish in which I have been plunged all day, I had well-nigh forgotten your existence, and you must be faint, I fear me, for want of nourishment." "Nay, madam," he answered, gently, indeed, but yet with a good deal of that comfortable self-assurance in spiritual matters which seems to have been an especial inheritance of "Cromwell's saints." "If _you_ have forgotten, the Lord at least hath been mindful of his servant, and hath cast so deep a slumber on my senses, that I have been altogether unconscious of the lapse of time, or of the absence of those carnal comforts which, however the spirit may rebel against them, are nevertheless not altogether to be despised, as being the means by which we receive strength to do the bidding of our Master." Mrs. Netterville could not help thinking that the posset-cup and soothing draught, which she had administered the night before, might have had as much as any especial interposition of Providence to say to his seasonable slumbers; but the times were too much out of joint to permit of her making, however reverently, such an observation, so she merely touched his brow and hand, and said: {182} "I am right glad, at all events, that you seem in nowise to have suffered from my neglect. Eat now and drink, I pray you; for I perceive by this refreshing moisture on your skin that all danger has passed away, and that you need at present no worse physic than good food and wine to restore you to your former strength." "Nay, madam," said the soldier, with great and hardly repressed feeling in his voice and manner. "Eat or drink I cannot, or in any way refresh myself, until I have poured forth my song of gratitude, first to the Lord of hosts, who hath delivered me from this great danger, and then to you, who have tended me (even as the widow of Sarepta might have waited on Elias) through the perils of a sickness from which my very comrades and fellow-laborers in the vineyard fled, trembling and afraid."