And Jane Chester--where was she while strangers were bearing away the husband of her youth to his lone grave? Amid her fever that day, amid all her delirium, one idea had been vivid and prominent before her. The woman's heart remained true to its anchorage amid the storm and fire of approaching ship-fever. Long after reason had failed, the love that was stronger than reason told her that some great evil was befalling her husband. Time was to her a vague idea; she thought that he had been gone for weeks--that he was seeking for her and the children along the wharves and in the dim alleys of the city, and that the Mayor had forbidden him to come home. She would find him--she would take food and clean garments to him in the street. He should not wander there so poverty-stricken and neglected, without her. In defiance of the Mayor, in defiance of the whole world, she would go to him. This thought ran through her burning brain, and trembled wildly on her tongue. Her husband--her husband--he could not come to her, and she must go to him. But the two little girls--they appeared to her like guards--great gaunt creatures dressed in fantastic uniform, stationed by her bed to coerce and frighten her. They held her back; they seemed to smother her in the bed-clothes, and gird her head down to the pillow with the hot clasp of their united hands. Those two little creatures became to her an object of terrible dread. She longed for strength to tear them down from the towering altitude which her imagination gave, and blindfold them, as they, in her wild fancy, had blindfolded her with their scorching hands. She saw little Mary Fuller put on her hood and go forth with a thrill of insane delight. That wild, uncouth form had seemed far more terrible than the other, and yet now the petite figure of her own child seemed to rise and swell over her like a fiend. "Ice--ice!" She knew, in her delirium, that this cry sometimes sent her dreaded jailors from the room. If they were absent, she could find her clothes--she could steal softly down stairs, and away after _him_. "Ice--ice!" she cried, "I will drink nothing unless the ice rattles in the glass--cold, cold. It must be cold as death, I say." Isabel rose up in terror, and taking their last sixpence, went forth for the ice. Then the mother laughed beneath the bedclothes--alone, all alone. She started up--tore off her cap and her night-dress, and thrust her unstockinged feet in a pair of slippers that stood near the bed.