She drew the bandage tightly about his head, pressed hard on the throbbing arteries, and sprinkled cold water on the linen and his hair. She had observed that he started whenever ice was put to his head, and therefore kept it cool, and avoided giving a shock. “You are sick, and I am going to make you well,” she said. “You are not to think, but to obey. I will do the thinking. Will you trust me?” “Yes, Edith,” he answered, after a pause, looking steadfastly at her, seeming in doubt whether it were a real form he saw, a real voice he heard. “This is your room, you see,” she said, laying one hand on his, and pointing with the other. “That is your book-shelf, there is your table and your crucifix. You know it all; but sickness and darkness are so confusing. Now, I’m going to give you one little glimpse of out-doors, only for a minute, though, because it would hurt your head to have too much light.” She went to the window, and drew aside the thick green curtain, and a golden ray from the setting sun flew in like a bird, and alighted on the clock. Those sick eyes shrank a little, but brightened. She returned, and leaned over the pillow, so as to have the same view through the window with him. “That green hill is Longwood,” she said; “and there is the flagstaff on the top of Mr. B----’s house, looking like the mast of a ship. Now I shall drop the curtain, and you are to go to sleep.” So, as his feverish fancies rose like mists, her calm denial or explanation swept them away; or, if the delirium fit was too strong for that, she held his hand, to assure him of companionship, and went with him wherever his tyrannical imagination dragged him, and found help there. When he sank in deeps of ocean, he heard a voice, as if from heaven, saying, “He who made the waves is stronger than they. Hold on to God, and he will not let you go.” If foes threatened him, he heard the reassuring text: “_The Lord is my light and my salvation; whom shall I fear? The Lord is the protector of my life; of whom shall I be afraid?_” If he groped in desolation, and cried out that every one had deserted him, she repeated: “_For my father and my mother have left me, but the Lord hath taken me up_.” “_Expect the Lord, do manfully, and let thy heart take courage, and wait thou for the Lord._” She followed him thus from terror to terror, imagining all the bitterness of them, trying to take that bitterness to herself, till they began to grow real to her, and she was glad to escape into the wholesome outer world, and see with her own eyes that the universe was not a sick-room. Hester had come up, and she called and took Edith out for a drive every day; and sometimes she went home to Hester’s house, and played with the children a while. She found their childish gayety and carelessness very soothing.