Excerpt from On the Susquehanna: A Novel

The four words he had spoken were uttered in so low a tone that no one not very close to him, or not on the watch for the slightest sound he might make, would have heard them. But she had had her perceptive faculties on the stretch almost continuously for many days and nights the more she became exhausted, so far as bodily strength or the power of thought was concerned, the sharper her senses seemed to get, until now the slightest murmur that escaped his lips, the least shade of a change in his expression, struck her with tenfold the natural force. She heard the words that he had breathed rather than spoken. Had the end then come at last? She clasped her hands together and gazed into his face with a look of anxious, inquiring agony. Doubtless it was near, but it had not yet come. She was be coming experienced in the knowledge of the signs of death. It was only one of those sudden paroxysms of faintness to which he was liable, though certainly the most severe one that she had yet observed. How many such steps toward the grave would he take ere he reached his destination? She asked herself this question, and then, without trying to answer it, seeing that the collapse was passing off, and that there was no immediate danger, she gave a sigh of relief, and turned away to busy herself with the preparation of a draught that his sudden exclamation had interrupted. Then, having completed her work, she again approached the bed, taking with her the goblet containing the potion she had mixed.

His eyes were closed, he was breathing more quietly, and his fingers had ceased to clutch automatically at the silken quilt that covered him. She laid one hand on his head, and with the other held the glass toward him.

Father! She said, take this. The doctor was very strict about your not missing a dose.

Her words roused the sick man from the state of dreamy abstraction into which he had fallen, for he turned his head and looked at her inquiringly, as though he was not quite certain in regard to her identity, and was striving so to co] lect his thoughts as to bring her once again into his memory. But his troubled expression was only momentary, for his face soon lighted up, and a smile of recognition passed over his countenance.

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