The sudden shock of these scenes was followed, in Mrs. Marvyn’s case, by a low, lingering fever.  Her room was darkened, and she lay on her bed, a pale, suffering form, with scarcely the ability to raise her hand.  The shimmering twilight of the sick-room fell on white napkins, spread over stands, where constantly appeared new vials, big and little, as the physician, made his daily visit, and prescribed now this drug and now that, for a wound that had struck through the soul.

Mary remained many days at the white house, because, to the invalid, no step, no voice, no hand was like hers.  We see her there now, as she sits in the glimmering by the bed-curtains,—­her head a little drooped, as droops a snowdrop over a grave;—­one ray of light from a round hole in the closed shutters falls on her smooth-parted hair, her small hands are clasped on her knees, her mouth has lines of sad compression, and in her eyes are infinite questionings.

CHAPTER XXIV.

When Mrs. Marvyn began to amend, Mary returned to the home cottage, and resumed the details of her industrious and quiet life.

Between her and her two best friends had fallen a curtain of silence.  The subject that filled all her thoughts could not be named between them.  The Doctor often looked at her pale cheeks and drooping form with a face of honest sorrow, and heaved deep sighs as she passed; but he did not find any power within himself by which he could approach her.  When he would speak, and she turned her sad, patient eyes so gently on him, the words went back again to his heart, and there, taking a second thought, spread upward wing in prayer.

Mrs. Scudder sometimes came to her room after she was gone to bed, and found her weeping; and when gently she urged her to sleep, she would wipe her eyes so patiently and turn her head with such obedient sweetness, that her mother’s heart utterly failed her.  For hours Mary sat in her room with James’s last letter spread out before her.  How anxiously had she studied every word and phrase in it, weighing them to see if the hope of eternal life were in them!  How she dwelt on those last promises!  Had he kept them?  Ah! to die without one word more!  Would no angel tell her?—­would not the loving God, who knew all, just whisper one word?  He must have read the little Bible!  What had he thought?  What did he feel in that awful hour when he felt himself drifting on to that fearful eternity?  Perhaps he had been regenerated,—­perhaps there had been a sudden change;—­who knows?—­she had read of such things;—­perhaps—­Ah, in that perhaps lies a world of anguish!  Love will not hear of it.  Love dies for certainty.  Against an uncertainty who can brace the soul?  We put all our forces of faith and prayer against it, and it goes down just as a buoy sinks in the water, and the next moment it is up again.  The soul fatigues itself with efforts which come and go in