She started suddenly awake, seeming to have been roused by the opening of a door. The fringe of a departing dream lay yet upon her eyes: was the door of the tomb in which she had lain so long burst from its hinges? was the day of the great resurrection come? Swiftly her senses settled themselves, and she saw plainly and remembered clearly. Yet could she be really awake? for in the wall opposite stood the form of a man! She neither cried out nor fainted, but sat gazing. She was not even afraid, only dumb with wonder. The man did not look fearful. A smile she seemed to have seen before broke gradually from his lips and spread over his face. The next moment he stepped from the wall and came towards her. Then sight and memory came together: in that wall was a door, said to lead into the next house: for the first time she saw it open! The man came nearer and nearer: it was Christopher! She rose, and held out her hand. "You are surprised to see me!" he said, "--and well you may be! Am I in your house?--And this watch! what does it mean? I seem to recognize the sweet face! I must have seen you and it together before!--Yes! it is Moxy!" "You are right, Mr. Christopher," she answered. "Dear little Moxy died of the small-pox in our cellar. He was just gone when I found them there." "Is it wise of you to expose yourself so much to the infection?" said the doctor. "Is it worthy of you to ask such a question?" returned Hester. "We have our work to do; life or death is the care of him who sets the work." The doctor bent his head low, lower, and lower still, before her. Nothing moves a man more than to recognize in another the principles which are to himself a necessity of his being and history. "I put the question to know on what grounds you based your action," he replied, "and I am answered." "Tell me then," said Hester, "how you came to be here. It seemed to my sleepy eyes as if an angel had melted his own door through the wall! Are you free of ordinary hindrances?" She asked almost in seriousness; for, with the lovely dead before her, in the middle of the night, roused suddenly from a sleep into which she had fallen with her thoughts full of the shining resurrection of the Lord, she would have believed him at once if he had told her that for the service of the Lord's poor he was enabled to pass where he pleased. He smiled with a wonderful sweetness as he made answer: "I hope you are not one of those who so little believe that the world and its ways belong to God, that they want to have his presence proved by something out of the usual way--something not so good; for surely the way He chooses to work almost always, must be a better way than that in which he only works now and then because of a special necessity!" By these words Hester perceived she was in the presence of one who understood the things of which he spoke.