"Very well, if it is your name, we will. Now you must go to sleep."
Faith complied with this request, although uncertain whether it was not prompted by a distrust of her promise. The stranger soon slept, and his young nurse then made a more attentive survey of his features than she had yet done. He seemed not over forty years of age, and would, in health, have been considered a handsome man,--although the fine silky hair, thin beard, sensitive nostril, and delicate mouth could never have expressed much of strength or resolution.
The traces of disease and starvation were painfully apparent; but it seemed to the thoughtful Faith that behind these she could perceive in the sorrowful, downward curve of the lips, in the lines of the hollow, throbbing temples, in the gloomy light of the dark eyes, symptoms of a long corroding care, which, though secretly, had done its work of devastation more surely and more ruthlessly than the more apparent foes.
"How he must have suffered!" murmured she. It seemed as if the tone of gentle pity had penetrated the light slumber, and reached the heart of the sick man,--for, opening his eyes, he smiled upon the girl, a wan, sad smile, which was at once an assent and a benison.
From that moment, until the welcome end of that sad life, Ichabod would patiently endure no tendance but Faith's; and she, with the calm and silent self-abnegation of her order, (for Florence Nightingale is but a type, and there are those all about us who lack but her opportunities,) devoted herself to him.
Her mother sometimes remonstrated, and begged her to yield her place in the sick-chamber to her or to one of the pauper women; but Faith, whose grave sweetness concealed more determination than a stranger would have guessed, would simply say,--
"Dear mother, what is a little fatigue to one as well as I am, compared with the pleasure of making this poor stranger's death-bed happy and quiet?--which it certainly would not be, if he was crossed in his fancy for seeing me about him." And the conscientious mind of the mother was forced to yield assent to this simple logic.
A few weeks thus passed, and then the sick man became a dying man. The pauper inmates of the house were all willing and anxious to watch beside him through the long nights, but Ichabod received all their attentions very ungraciously; nor was it till Faith told him, in her kind, decided way, that she could not stay with him at night, that he consented to allow the others to do so.