creature to insure Mary’s life if it was not possessed of the power to bring about so great a result.  So she cogitated and mused and philosophized in her small way, till she came to the conclusion that the pelican not only had the destiny of Mary in its hands, but was under an obligation to save her from that death which was so terrible to her.  Nor had she done yet with the all-important subject; for all at once it came into her head as a faint memory, that one day, when her father was taking her along with her mother through the city, he pointed to a gilded sign, with a large bird represented thereon, tearing its breast with its long beak, and letting out the blood to its young, who were holding their mouths open to drink it in.  “There,” said he, “is the Pelican;” words she remembered even to that hour, for they were imprinted upon her mind by the formidable appearance of the wonderful-looking creature feeding its young with the very blood of its bosom.  But withal she had sense enough to know—­being, as we have said, a small philosopher—­that a mere bird, however endowed with the power of sustaining the lives of its offspring, could not save that of her sister, and therefore it behoved to be only the symbol of some power within the office over the door of which the said sign was suspended.  Nor in all this was Annie Maconie more extravagant than are nineteen-twentieths of the thousand millions in the world who still cling to occult causes.

And with those there came other equally strange thoughts; but beyond all she could not for the very life of her comprehend that most inexcusable apathy of her father, who, though he had heard with his own ears, from good authority, that her beloved Mary was lying in the next bedroom dying, never seemed to think of hurrying away to town—­even to that very Pelican who had so generously undertaken to insure Mary’s life.  It was an apathy unbecoming a father; and the blood of her little heart warmed with indignation at the very time that the said heart was down in sorrow as far as its loose strings would enable it to go.  But was there no remedy?  To be sure there was, and Annie knew, moreover, what it was; but then it was to be got only by a sacrifice, and that sacrifice she also knew, though it must of necessity be kept in the meantime as secret as the wonderful doings in the death-chamber of the palace of a certain Bluebeard.

Great thoughts these for so little a woman as Annie Maconie; and no doubt the greatness and the weight of them were the cause why, for all that day—­every hour of which her father was allowing to pass—­she was more melancholy and thoughtful than she had ever been since Mary began to be ill.  But, somehow, there was a peculiar change which even her mother could observe in her; for while she had been in the habit of weeping for her sister, yea, and sobbing very piteously, she was all this day apparently in a reverie.  Nor even up to the time of her going to bed was she less thoughtful and abstracted, even