For a moment, he studied it in silence.
He gave it back with a gesture of amazement. "God! nurse," he whispered,
"she should be in her grave by now! It's a miracle! But she has always
been like that--" he continued, half to himself, looking with troubled
admiration toward the bed at the other end of the room--"always."
He went slowly forward to the chair that the nurse placed for him. Seating
himself quietly beside his patient, and bending forward with intense
interest, his fine old head bowed, he regarded with more than professional
care the wasted face upon the pillow.
The doctor remembered, too well, when those finely moulded features--now,
so worn by sorrow, so marked by sickness, so ghastly in the hue of
death--were rounded with young-woman health and tinted with rare
loveliness. He recalled that day when he saw her a bride. He remembered
the sweet, proud dignity of her young wifehood. He saw her, again, when
her face shone with the glad triumph and the holy joy of motherhood.
The old physician turned from his patient, to look with sorrowful eyes
about the room that was to witness the end.
Why was such a woman dying like this? Why was a life of such rich mental
and spiritual endowments--of such wealth of true culture--coming to its
close in such material poverty?
The doctor was one of the few who knew.
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