Ah, happiest experience of life, when the flood tide sets back through the veins! You have no longer any pain; you are not well enough to feel any responsibility; you cannot work; there is no obligation resting on you but one--that is rest. Such perfect passivity Kike had never known before. He could walk but little. He sat the livelong day by the open window, as listless as the grass that waved before the wind. All the sense of dire responsibility, all those feelings of the awfulness of life, and the fearfulness of his work, and the dreadfulness of his accountability, were in abeyance. To eat, to drink, to sleep, to wake and breathe, to suffer as a passive instrument the play of whatever feeling might chance to come, was Kike's life. In this state the severity of his character was laid aside. He listened to the quick and eager conversation of Dr. Morgan with a gentle pleasure; he answered the motherly questions of Mrs. Morgan with quiet gratitude; he admired the goodness of Miss Jane Morgan, their eldest and most exemplary daughter, as a far off spectator. There were but two things that had a real interest for him. He felt a keen delight in watching the wayward flight of the barn swallows as they went chattering out from under the eaves--their airy vagabondage was so restful. And he liked to watch the quick, careless tread of Henrietta Morgan, the youngest of the doctor's daughters, who went on forever talking and laughing with as little reck as the swallows themselves. Though she was eighteen, there was in her full child-like cheeks, in her contagious laugh--a laugh most unprovoked, coming of itself--in her playful way of performing even her duties, a something that so contrasted with and relieved the habitual austerity of Kike's temper, and that so fell in with his present lassitude and happy carelessness, that he allowed his head, resting weakly upon a pillow, to turn from side to side, that his eyes might follow her. So diverting were her merry replies, that he soon came to talk with her for the sake of hearing them. He was not forgetful of the solemn injunctions Mr. Wesley had left for the prudent behavior of young ministers in the presence of women. With Miss Jane he was very careful lest he should in any way compromise himself, or awaken her affections. Jane was the kind of a girl he would want to marry, if he were to marry. But Nettie was a child--a cheerful butterfly--as refreshing to his weary mind as a drink of cold water to a fever-patient. When she was out of the room, Kike was impatient; when she returned, he was glad. When she sewed, he drew the large chair in which he rested in front of her, and talked in his grave fashion, while she, in turn, amused him with a hundred fancies. She seemed to shine all about him like sunlight. Poor Kike could not refuse to enjoy a fellowship so delightful, and Nettie Morgan's reverence for young Lumsden's saintliness, and pity for his sickness, grew apace into a love for him.