"I am sik. Com to Sharty Hospitl. He ain't duin nuthen fer me. HANNAH."
"Mistah Breckenridge" carefully placed the note in his pocket, put his hat on his head, and went to the Charity Hospital. It was not hard to find Hannah. She had not been there long, but the doctors and nurses liked her and seemed to have been expecting him.
"She's the life of the place," said one of them. "She's got a lot of pluck, too, and laughs when we hurt her. She thinks she's going to get well, but she isn't."
The little round face of 'Rastus changed expression.
"She gwine tuh die?" he asked, quickly.
"Sure," was the terse reply.
"How—how soon?"
The doctor hesitated. "In about a month, I think," he said, finally.
'Rastus carried the memory of the words into the ward where she lay, and then felt a quick sense of reaction. Die? Why, this was the old-time Hannah, the Hannah of his youth, the Hannah he had married. She was thinner, but the lines had smoothed out of her face and her big black eyes looked up at him as confidingly as the eyes of a baby. She laughed, too, a little—a ghost of the old, fat, comfortable chuckle; but there was nothing of death nor even of suffering about Hannah that day. Her spirit was not yet overthrown.
"Ahm awful glad tuh see yuh, honey," she said. "Ah knew yuh'd cum."