The girl propped her father up with rugs and cushions so that he found his position tolerable, and he fell asleep. The afternoon passed, and twilight came on. Greenish-yellow tints coloured the horizon, and a small white crescent gleamed above the darkening earth. Through the open window of the coupé came the warm, balmy air of the spring. Sometimes there mingled with the acrid, searching odour of the undeveloped foliage the full, sweet fragrance of some blossoming fruit-tree. A scarcely perceptible breeze swept gently and caressingly over the meadows, and lightly rippled the surface of the large quiet pond past which the train rushed. Here and there the level landscape was dotted by a village,--long barns and hay-ricks covered with blackened straw, grouped irregularly about some little church or castle among trees white with blossoms or pale green with opening leaf-buds.
The colonel slept on. Suddenly Stella perceived that she had lost her bracelet,--the one with the four-leaved clover. She moved with a sudden start. The colonel awoke.
"Where are we?" he asked.
"In an hour we shall be at home: it is only three stations off," she said, soothingly, with a beating heart.
He bent his head, folded his hands, and prepared to wait patiently. But it was impossible: a deadly anguish assailed him. He looked round in despair like some trapped animal.
"I am ill!" he cried. "I cannot tell what ails me. I never felt so before!"
He coughed convulsively, but briefly, then tried to move the cushions so that his head might find a more comfortable resting-place.
"Take more room, papa; lay your head in my lap," Stella entreated, tenderly.
He did so. He laid his head on her knees, and, taking her hand in his, held it against his cheek. The feverish unrest which had hitherto throbbed throughout his frame subsided, giving place to a delicious desire to sleep. For the last time the vision rose upon his mind of the drunken father being led home by his little girl; then all grew indistinct. He dreamed; he thought he was staggering painfully through a bog, when some one took him by the hand and led him across a narrow bridge beneath which gleamed dark, slowly-flowing water. He looked down; it was Stella who was leading him, but Stella as a little three-year-old child, with her simple little white night-cap tied beneath her chin, her rosy little bare feet showing beneath the hem of her white night-gown. The bridge creaked beneath him; he started and awoke.
"Are we at home?" he asked, scarce audibly.