“I trust so,” Adah answered, her own heart going silently up to the Giver of life and health, asking, if it were possible, that her noble friend might be spared.
Old Sam, too, with streaming eyes stole out to his bethel by the spring, and prayed for the dear “Massah Hugh” lying so still at Spring Bank, and insensible to all the prayers going up in his behalf.
How terrible that deathlike stupor was, and the physician, when later in the afternoon he came again, shook his head sadly.
“I’d rather see him rave till it took ten men to hold him,” he said, feeling the wiry pulse which were now beyond his count.
“Is there nothing that will rouse him?” Alice asked, “no name of one he loves more than another?”
The doctor answered “no; love for woman-kind, save as he feels it for his mother or his sister, is unknown to Hugh Worthington.”
But Alice did not think so. The only words he had whispered since she sat there, together with Muggins’ story of the Bible and the curl, would indicate that far down in Hugh’s heart, where the world had never seen, there was hidden a mighty, undying love for some one. How she wished they were alone, that she might whisper, that name in his ear, but with the doctor there, and Aunt Eunice and Densie close at hand, she dared not, lest she should betray the secret she had no right to possess.
“I’ll speak to him of his mother,” she said, and moistening with ice the lips which were now of a purple hue she said to him softly,
“Mr. Worthington.”
“Call him Hugh,” Aunt Eunice whispered, and Alice continued,