The old pauper turned upon him a glance of positive rapture. He clasped his thin, withered hands, trembling like rushes in the winds of autumn. "Holy and Blessed Virgin," he prayed, almost with a sob, "be good to him for giving a poor old dying creature the wish of his heart! Blessed St. Peter--" But the rush of joy was too great. With a face of ecstasy the old man died. MISS GAYLORD AND JENNY When Alice Gaylord was, by the death of her grandmother, set free from the long servitude of attending upon the invalid, it might have seemed that nothing need hinder the fulfilling of her protracted engagement to Dr. Carroll. The friends of both the young people expressed, in decorous fashion, their satisfaction that old Mrs. Gaylord, ninety and bed-ridden, should at last have been released, and it was entirely well understood that what they meant was to signify their pleasure at the ending of Alice's tedious waiting. Some doubt in regard to the girl's health, however, still clouded the prospect. Long care and confinement had told on her; and when a decent interval had passed after the death, and the wedding did not take place, people began to say that it was such a pity that Alice was not well enough to be married. Dr. Carroll was thinking of her health as, one gloomy November afternoon, he walked down West Cedar Street to the house where Gaylords had dwelt from the time when West Cedar Street began its decorous existence, and where Alice declared she had herself lived for generations. He glanced up at the narrow strip of sky like dull flannel overhead, around at the dwellings like a row of proper spinsters ranged on either side of the way, and at the Gaylord house itself, a brick and glass epitome of old Boston respectability. He reflected impatiently that of course Alice could be no better until he got her out of an atmosphere so depressing. Then he remembered that he had always liked West Cedar Street, and he began to wonder whether he were not getting so morbid over Alice that some other physician should be called in. He had long been baffled by being unable to discover anything wrong, beyond the fact that the girl was worn out with the strain of ministering to an imperious and exacting invalid. She was nervously exhausted; and he said to himself for the hundredth time that rest was the only thing needed. A few months would set everything right. The difficulty was that time had thus far not come up to what was expected of it. Carroll was forced to acknowledge that, in spite of tonics and rest, Alice was really not much better, and he had come almost to feel that the real cause of her languor and weakness was involved in teasing mystery.