He spent more than an hour chatting with Mrs. Riley, and had never found her so “nice” a person before; so easy comes human fellowship when we have had a stroke of fortune. When he went again to his room there was Mary kneeling by the bedside, with her head slipped under the snowy mosquito net, all in fine linen, white as the moonlight, frilled and broidered, a remnant of her wedding glory gleaming through the long, heavy wefts of her unbound hair.
“Why, Mary”—
There was no answer.
“Mary?” he said again, laying his hand upon her head.
The head was slowly lifted. She smiled an infant’s smile, and dropped her cheek again upon the bedside. She had fallen asleep at the foot of the Throne.
At that same hour, in an upper chamber of a large, distant house, there knelt another form, with bared, bowed head, but in the garb in which it had come in from the street. Praying? This white thing overtaken by sleep here was not more silent. Yet—yes, praying. But, all the while, the prayer kept running to a little tune, and the words repeating themselves again and again; “Oh, don’t you remember sweet Alice—with hair so brown—so brown—so brown? Sweet Alice, with hair so brown?” And God bent his ear and listened.
CHAPTER XXII.
BORROWER TURNED LENDER.