experience, and silenced my conscience by intending to return when
ordinary life should have become tolerable to me--a time that never
has come. At last, in the height of that pestilential season in
India, came a letter, warning me that my brother's widow had got the
mastery over my poor father, and was cruelly abusing it, so that only
my return could deliver him. It was when hundreds were perishing,
and I the only medical man near; when to have left my post would have
been both disgraceful and murderous. Then I was laid low myself; and
while I was conquering the effects of cholera, came tidings that made
it nothing to me whether they or I conquered. This,' and he touched
one of his white curling locks, 'was not done by mere bodily exertion
or ailment.'

'You would have been too late any way,' said Ethel.

'No, not if I had gone immediately. I might have got him out of that
woman's hands, and made his life happy for years. There was the
sting, but the crime had been long before. You know the rest. I had
no health to remain, no heart to come home; and then came vagrancy
indeed. I drifted wherever restlessness or impulse took me, till all
my working years were over, and till the day when the sight of your
father's wedding-ring showed me that I should not break my mad word
by accepting the only welcome that any creature gave me.'

'And, oh! surely you have been comforted by him?'

'Comforted! Cut to the heart would be truer. One moment, I could
only look at him as having borne off my treasure to destroy it; but
then there rose on me his loving, patient, heartbroken humility and
cheerfulness; and I saw such a character, such a course, as showed me