It is from their want of this faith, and their consequent arrogance and conceit, that the ladies who aspire to help in hospitals give the doctors so much trouble: they have not yet learned _obedience,_ the only path to any good, the one essential to the saving of the world.

One who can not obey is the merest slave--essentially and in himself a slave.

The crisis of Tom's fever was at length favorably passed, but the result remained doubtful.
By late hours and strong drink, he had done not a little to weaken a constitution, in itself, as I have said, far from strong; while the unrest of what is commonly and foolishly called a bad conscience, with misery over the death of his child and the conduct which had disgraced him in his own eyes and ruined his wife's happiness, combined to retard his recovery.
While he was yet delirious, and grief and shame and consternation operated at will on his poetic nature, the things he kept saying over and over were very pitiful; but they would have sounded more miserable by much in the ears of one who did not look so far ahead as Mary.

She, trained to regard all things in their true import, was rejoiced to find him loathing his former self, and beyond the present suffering saw the gladness at hand for the sorrowful man, the repenting sinner.

Had she been mother or sister to him, she could hardly have waited on him with more devotion or tenderness.
One day, as his wife was doing some little thing for him, he took her hand in his feeble grasp, and pressing it to his face, wet with the tears of reviving manhood, said: "We might have been happy together, Letty, if I had but known how much you were worth, and how little I was worth myself!--Oh me! oh me!" He burst into an incontrollable wail that tortured Letty with its likeness to the crying of her baby.
"Tom! my own darling Tom!" she cried, "when you speak as if I belonged to you, it makes me as happy as a queen.