“Father,” said she, “I want you to see the way I’ll look to-morrow.  Isn’t this dress pretty?”

“Lovely,” said Harry.  “It is very becoming, too,” he added.

Indeed, Maria really looked pretty again in this charming costume.  During the last few months her cheeks had filled out and she had gotten some lovely curves of girlhood.  Her eyes shone with a peculiar brilliancy, her red lips trembled into a smile, her hair, in a fluff above her high forehead, caught the light.

Maria laughed gayly.  “Take care, father, or you will make me vain,” she said.

“You have some reason to be,” Harry said, honestly.  “You are going to graduate first in your class, and—­well, you are pretty, dear—­at least you are to father, and, I guess, to other folks.”

Maria blushed.  “Only to father, because he is partial,” she said.  Then she went up to him and rubbed her blooming cheek against his.  “Do you know what makes me happier than anything else?” she said—­“happier than graduating first, happier than my pretty dress, happier than anything?”

“No.  What, dear?”

“Feeling that you are well again.”

There was an almost imperceptible pause before Harry replied.  Then he said, in his pleasant voice, which had never grown old, “Yes, dear; I am better, dear, I think.”

“Think,” Maria said, gayly.  “Why, you are well, father.  Don’t you know you are well?”

“Yes, I think I am better, dear.”

“Better?  You are well.  Nobody can look as young and handsome as you do and be ill, possibly.  You are well, father.  I know you can’t quite get what that horrid old croaking doctor told you out of your mind, but doctors don’t know everything.  You are well, and that makes me happier than anything else in the world.”

Harry laughed a little faintly.  “Well, I dare say you are right, dear,” he said.

“Right?—­of course I am right,” said Maria.  Then she danced off to change her gown.

After she had gone, Harry rose from the chair; he had been sitting beside the centre-table with the evening paper.  He walked over to the window and looked out at the night.  It was bright moonlight.  The trees were in full leaf, and the shadows were of such loveliness that they fairly seemed celestial.  Harry gazed out at the night scene, at the moon riding through the unbelievable and unfathomable blue of the sky, like a crystal ball, with a slight following of golden clouds; he gazed at the fairy shadows which transformed the familiar village street into something beyond earth, and he sighed.  The conviction of his approaching dissolution had never been so strong as at that moment.  He seemed fairly to see his own mortality—­that gate of death which lay wide open for him.  Yet, all at once, a sense of peace and trust almost ineffable came over him.  Death seemed merely the going-out into the true open, the essence of the moonlight and the beauty.  It seemed the tasting and absorbing the food for his