“Oh, for sweet pity’s sake, let us hasten the arrangements!” she cried, feverishly. * * * * * Captain Linwood, the young American hero, or Rolfe Maxwell, as we shall henceforth know him, lay with half-closed, dark, weary eyes on his cot in the hospital ward, thinking half regretfully of what the surgeon on his afternoon round had just said to him: “Cheer up, my lad, cheer up! You’re worth a dozen dead men yet. I’m just going out to send a report to the newspapers that the story of your being mortally wounded is all bosh. A young fellow with a splendid physique like yours is not going to die of some severe scratches and an arm broken in two places by bullets because he waved the Cuban flag so high in the enemy’s face. I’ll own that you’re disabled from fighting for many months to come. But what of that? You need a rest, and if you recuperate fast, you can go home to your friends in a few weeks, and there’s still a sound arm to embrace your best girl with, ha! ha! Come now, brighten up, I say! You don’t show as much pluck in bearing pain as you did in facing the enemy; but you’ve got to cultivate cheerfulness just to aid your recovery.” He went away rather anxious over his patient’s settled despondency, and Rolfe lay ruminating with a feverish flush on his cheeks and a hopeless sorrow in his fine dark eyes. “Ah, if he only knew how little I care to get well, and that both arms might as well have been broken, for they will never again embrace a woman’s form in love. Why did not the Spanish soldiers give me release in the midst of battle from this torture of life? Must I indeed recover in spite of myself when I would rather die, even though I know she would not shed one tear when she heard that my heart was still at last--the heart that loved her fatally and too well?” Some familiar lines he had often read seemed to float mockingly through his weary brain: “I go--and she doth miss me not! So shall I die, and be forgot-- Forgot as is some sorrow past, Or cloud by fleeting sickness cast. “Death and the all-absorbing tomb Will hide me in eternal gloom. And she will live--as gay--alone, As though I had been never known.” He closed his heavy eyes as soft footsteps and the flutter of a woman’s robe came down the ward between the rows of white beds. Some one suddenly knelt beside his narrow cot. “A kind Sister of Charity to pray for me,” he thought; but a soft hand fell on his head caressingly, and tears splashed down hotly on his wasted cheek. “Rolfe, my darling husband!” sobbed a tender voice, and his eyes flashed open wildly. “Viola! Is this a dream?”