“God bless—thee, Mrs.—Kretznow,” she said gaspingly. She took the girl’s hand. “How good thou art to come and see a sick creature!”
“My husband willed it,” the new wife said, in clumsy deprecation. She had a simple, stupid air that did not seem wholly due to the constraint of the strange situation.
“Thou wast right to obey. Be good to him, my child. For three years he waited on me, when I lay helpless. He has suffered much. Be good to him!”
With an impulsive movement she drew the girl’s head down to her and kissed her on the lips. Then, with an anguished cry of “Leave me for to-day!” she jerked the blanket over her face and burst into tears. She heard the couple move hesitatingly away. The girl’s beauty shone on her through the opaque coverings.
“O God!” she wailed, “God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, let me die now! For the merits of the patriarchs take me soon, take me soon!”
Her vain, passionate prayer, muffled by the bedclothes, was wholly drowned by ear-piercing shrieks from the ward above—screams of agony mingled with half-articulate accusations of attempted poisoning—the familiar paroxysm of the palsied woman who clung to life.
The thrill passed again through Sister Margaret. She uplifted her sweet, humid eyes.
“Ah, Christ!” she whispered, “if I could die for her!”
