CONCLUSION.
Three days after my meeting with Juanita in Leicester Square, I was lying propped up in bed in the hospital, feeling very weak and miserable, when one of the nurses came to tell me that two visitors were coming up to see me.
"Who are they," I asked,—"men or women?"
"Ladies," the nurse replied, as if she were speaking of a third sex. "Drove up in their own carriage."
"Ladies!" I said. "Who can they be?"
Any further wonderment was put a stop to by the entrance of the ladies themselves, escorted by the house surgeon. Can you guess who they were? One was a lady I had never seen before, a chaperon, I suppose. The other was—but there, I must leave you to imagine who alone would have sufficient pity to forget the past, and to come and comfort the sick and sorrowful? It was Maud! The Maud I had treated so shamefully, to whom I had done so great a wrong. I could hardly believe my eyes! With that exquisite grace that always characterized her movements, she floated up the long bare ward to where I lay, bringing with her sunshine and happiness unspeakable.
"Jack, Jack," she began, taking my great brown paw between her dainty hands, "welcome home, ten thousand welcomes home!"
Though the words she uttered were nothing more than ordinary, there was something in the way she said them that invested them with a charm no other woman could have given them.
"How did you know I was here?" I asked, when the first embarrassment was over, and she had taken a chair by my side.
"Papa saw it in the paper," she said, "and we immediately made inquiries."