So, while Fanny went to bed and slept Lucy sat all night in the sick-room with Mrs. Brown, and when the next morning came she was looking very pale, and languid, but very beautiful withal. At least such was the mental compliment paid her by Thornton Hastings, who was passing through Hanover and stopped over a train to see his old college friend and perhaps tell him what he began to feel it was his duty to tell him in spite of his promise to Anna. She was nearly well now and had driven with him twice to the park, but he could not be insensible to what she suffered, or how she shrank from hearing the proposed wedding discussed, and in his intense pity for her he had half resolved to break his word and tell Arthur what he knew. But he changed his mind when he had been in Hanover a few hours and watched the little fairy, who, like some ministering angel, glided about the sick-room, showing herself every whit a woman, and making him repent that he had ever called her frivolous or silly. She was not either, he said, and with a magnanimity for which he thought himself entitled to a good deal of praise, he felt that it was very possible for Arthur to love the gentle little girl who smoothed his pillows so tenderly, and whose fingers threaded so lovingly the dark brown locks when she thought he—Thornton—was not looking on. She was very coy of _him_, and very distant towards him, for she had not forgotten his sin, and she treated him at first with a reserve for which he could not account. But as the days went on and Arthur grew so sick that his parishioners began to tremble for their young minister’s life, and to think it perfectly right for Lucy to stay with him even if she was assisted in her labor of love by the stranger from New York, the reserve all disappeared, and on the most perfect terms of amity she and Thornton Hastings watched together by Arthur’s side. Thornton Hastings learned more lessons than one in that sick-room where Arthur’s faith in God triumphed over the terrors of the grave which at one time seemed so near, while the timid Lucy, whom he had only known as a gay butterfly of fashion, dared before him to pray that God would spare her promised husband, or give her grace to say “Thy will be done.” Thornton could hardly say that he was skeptical before, but any doubts he might have had touching the great fundamental truths on which a true religion rests were gone forever, and he left Hanover a changed man in more respects than one.