“Nannie, I cannot bear it!”
“Hush, Alice; you must not give way to such wild grief—the excitement will be very bad for you.”
“But what will Adam say? It will be a terrible blow; his heart was so set upon the fulfilment of his hopes, and now——”
A heart-broken wail completed the sentence as the pale, beautiful woman, resting upon the snowy pillows of an old-fashioned canopied bed, covered her face with her delicate hands and fell to sobbing with a wild sorrow which shook her slight frame from head to foot.
“Alice! Alice! don’t! Adam will come home to find that he has lost both wife and child if you do not try to control yourself.”
The latter speaker, a tall, muscular woman, with a kindly but resolute face, which bespoke a strong character as well as a tender heart, knelt beside the bed, and laid her cheek against the colorless one upon the pillow with motherly tenderness and sympathy. But her appealing words only seemed to increase the violence of the invalid’s grief, and, with a look of anxiety sweeping over her countenance, the woman arose, after a moment, when, pouring a few drops from a bottle into a spoon, she briefly informed her charge that it was time for her medicine.
The younger woman meekly swallowed the potion, although her bosom continued to heave with sobs, and tears still rained over her hueless cheeks.
Her companion sat down near her, an expression of patient endurance on her face, and in the course of fifteen or twenty minutes she was rewarded by seeing the invalid fall into a profound slumber.
“Thank Heaven!” she muttered at last, with a sigh of relief, “there will be an interval of rest, but I dread the awakening.”
Miss Nancy Porter was a spinster, upward of forty, and one of those stanch, reliable women who always seem like a bulwark of strength, and equal to any emergency.