"Not one single bit, my little darling child."
The child drew a long sigh of content, and put up her arms. "Here I want to go to sleep," she said. "Your lap is so nice, Mark; and your shoulder comes just right for my head. Is you comfy so, Mark?"
"Very comfy, Snow-white."
"Do you love me?"
"Very much, little one; very, very much."
"Me too you. Good-night, Mark. I'm glad—you was—a dwarf, and—just right—for me!"
Through the long night those tender arms held her. Her sweet head rested on his shoulder; he never moved; he timed his breathing so that it might come and go with hers, softly rising, softly falling, hour after hour. Only toward morning, when the dawn chill came on, he laid the lax limbs and heavy head on the bed, and covered them tenderly, and sat and watched beside the bed till day. It was more than the child's mother had ever done, but why should she do it, when the nurses were always there?
[CHAPTER IX.]
RESTORED TO LIFE.
So it came to pass that James Phillips, driving in painful state toward the forest, met the third great surprise of his life. The first had been when, as a child, he was snatched from the hands of the brutal father whose lash still, whenever he thought of it, whistled its way down on his cringing body. He often recalled that moment; the centring of agony in one nerve and another of his tortured frame as the blows fell, the setting of his teeth to keep the screams back because that other should not have the pleasure of hearing him scream; then the sudden flash, the cry, the little figure, no bigger than his own, standing over him, ablaze with wrath, the hulking bully cowering abject, the lash dropped and never raised again. Following this, the years of kindness without intermission; the watching, befriending, educating. Phillips was not a man of expression, or he would have said that, if God Almighty created him, Mark Ellery made him. And always so wise, so kind, with the light in his eyes, and the smile that people would turn in the street to look after.