Ellen Webster was, after all, nothing but an old, old woman. Perhaps, he reflected, in a wave of regret, he should have realized this and made allowance for it. Then a reaction from his tense emotion swept over him, and he thought with amusement how angry she would be should she suddenly regain consciousness and find herself within his grasp. But she did not come to herself, and when he laid her on the bed that Lucy had prepared, she was still as unmindful of his touch as she would have been had the spirit within her really taken flight. Martin did not linger now. His decision was made. "I'll step over home an' get the other horse an' team, an' fetch the doctor back," he said quietly. "I wish you would." She did not thank him, accepting the favor with the simplicity of a weaker nature that leans unabashed on a stronger. Her dependence and her confession of it thrilled him with pleasure. She heard him creep cautiously down over the stairs and go out at the side door. Then she turned her attention to making more comfortable the helpless woman upon the bed. When at length there was nothing more she could do, she sat down to wait the doctor's coming. The time dragged on. It seemed an eternity before help came. In the meantime Ellen lay immovable as she had done from the first, her hard, sharp-cut features harder and more sharply defined in their pallor than the girl had realized them to be. In the furrowed brow, the deep-set eyes, the pitiless mouth there was not one gentle line which death could borrow to soften the stamp with which revenge and bitterness had branded her. So she would look in her coffin, Lucy thought with awe. Majesty might come into her face in the last great moment; but it would be the majesty of hate, not of love. What a sad, sad ending to a life! As the girl sat thinking of the friendless, isolated existence of the woman before her, she wondered idly what her aunt would have been, if, while her nature was still plastic, she had married and sacrificed her ego in years of service for others. Ah, she would never then have come to this lonely, embittered old age! Children would have prattled at her knee, and their children would have made glad the silent house. How full of joy and opportunity such an existence would have been! But these blessings, alas, had not been granted Ellen. Perhaps it had been her own fault. She may deliberately have thrust the gentle visitant, Love, from her dwelling, and once repulsed he may never have sought again for entrance. Or it might be the woman was one at whose door the god had never knocked. Oh, the pity of it! For after all did life hold any gift so rare, so supreme, as the perfect devotion of a man and woman who loved one another. It must be a wonderful thing, that divine miracle of Love.