Alas! poor Charles. While they were all dividing the spoil at home, thinking him dead, where was he?

At Scutari. What happened to him before he got there, no one knows or ever will know. He does not. remember, and there is no one else to tell. He was passed from hand to hand and put on board ship. Here fever set in, and he passed from a state of stupid agony into a state of delirium. He may have lain on the pier in the pouring rain, moistening his parched lips in the chilling shower; he may have been jolted from hospital to hospital, and laid in draughty passages, till a bed was found for him: as others were. But he happily knew nothing of it. Things were so bad with him now that it did not much matter how he was treated. Read Lord Sidney Osborne’s “Scutari and its Hospitals,” and see how he might have been, and probably was. It is no part of our duty to dig up and exhibit all that miserable ismanagement. I think we have learnt onr lesson. I think I will go bail it don’t happen again. Before Charles knew where he was, there was a great change for the better. The hospital nurses arrived early in November.

He thinks that there were faint gleams of consciousness in his delirium. In the first, he says he was lying on his back, and above him were the masts and spars of a ship, and a sailor-boy was sitting out on a yard in the clear blue, mending a rope or doing something. It may have been a dream or not. Afterwards there were periods, distinctly remembered, when he seemed conscious — conscious of pain, and space, and time — to a certain extent. At these times he began to understand, in a way, that he was dead, and in hell. The delirium was better than this at ordinary times, in spite of its headlong incongruities. It was not so unbearable, save at times, when there came the feeling, too horrible for human brain to bear, of being millions and millions of miles, or of centuries, away, with no road back; at such times there was nothing to be done but to leap out of bed, and cry aloud for help in God’s name.

Then there came a time when he began, at intervals, to see a great vaulted arch overhead, and to wonder whether or no it was the roof of the pit. He began, after studjdng the matter many times, to find that pain ad ceased, and that the great vaulted arch was real. And he heard low voices once at this time — blessed voices of his fellow-men. He was content to wait.

At last, his soul and consciousness seemed to return to him in a strange way. He seemed to pass out of some abnormal state into a natural one. For he became aware that he was alive; nay, more, that he was asleep, and dreaming a silly, pleasant dream, and that he could wake himself at any time. He awoke, expecting to awake in his old room at Ravenshoe. But he was not there, and looked round him in wonder.

The arch he remembered was overhead. That was real enough. Three people were round his bed — a doctor in undress, a grey-haired gentleman who peered into his face, and a lady.

“God bless me!” said the doctor. “We have fetched him through. Look at his eyes, just look at his eyes. As sane an eye as yours or mine, and the pulse as round as a button.”

“Do you know us, my man?” said the gentleman.

It was possible enough that he did not, for he had never set eyes on him before. The gentleman meant only, “Are you sane enough to know your fellow-creatures when you see one? “Charles thought he must be some one he had met in society in old times and ought to recognise. He framed a polite reply, to the ffect tliat he hoped he had been well since he met him last, and that, if he found himself in the west, he would not pass Ravenshoe without coming to see him.

The doctor laughed. “A little abroad, still, I daresay; I have pulled you through. You have had a narrow escape.”

Charles was recovered enough to take his hand and thank him fervently, and whispered, “Would you tell me one thing, sir? How did Lady Hainault come here?”

“Lady Hainault, my man?”

“Yes; she was standing at the foot of the bed.”

“That is no Lady Hainault, my man; that is Miss Nightingale. Do you ever say your prayers?”

“Say them tonight before you go to sleep, and remember her name in them. Possibly they may get to heaven the quicker for it. Goodnight.”

Prayers forgotten, eh! How much of all this misery lay in that, I wonder? How much of this dull, stupid, careless despair — earth a hopeless, sunless wilderness, and heaven not thought of? Read on.

But, while you read, remember that poor Charles had had no domestic religious education whatever. The vicar had taught him his catechism and his prayers. After that, Shrewsbury and Oxford. Read on, but don’t condemn — at least not yet.

That he thanked God with all the earnestness of his warm heart that night, and remembered that name the doctor told him, you may be sure. But, when the prayer was finished, he began to think whether or no it was sincere, whether it would not be better that he should die, and that it should be all over and done. His creed was, that, if he died in the faith of Christ, bearing no ill will to anyone, having repented of his sins, it would not go ill with him. Would it not be better to die now that he could fulfil those conditions, and not tempt the horrible black future? Certainly.

In time he left watching the great arch overhead, and the creeping shadows, and the patch of light on t............