Chapter 6 - Page 2

would have been one of his
deep laughs, but which he modified in consideration of his patient's
tenderness of brain. "We both of us fought a good fight; for though you
struck no actual stroke, you took them as unflinchingly as ever I saw a
man, and so turned the fortune of the battle better than if you smote
with a sledge-hammer. Two things puzzle me in the affair. First, whence
came my assailants, all in that moment of time, unless Satan let loose
out of the infernal regions a synod of fiends, hoping thus to get a
triumph over me. And secondly, whence came you, my preserver, unless
you are an angel, and dropped down from the sky."

"No," answered the stranger, with quiet simplicity. "I was passing
through the street to my little school, when I saw your peril, and felt
it my duty to expostulate with the people."

"Well," said the grim Doctor, "come whence you will, you did an angel's
office for me, and I shall do what an earthly man may to requite it.
There, we will talk no more for the present."

He hushed up the children, who were already, of their own accord,
walking on tiptoe and whispering, and he himself even went so far as to
refrain from the usual incense of his pipe, having observed that the
stranger, who seemed to be of a very delicate organization, had seemed
sensible of the disagreeable effect on the atmosphere of the room. The
restraint lasted, however, only till (in the course of the day) crusty
Hannah had fitted up a little bedroom on the opposite side of the
entry, to which she and the grim Doctor moved the stranger, who, though
tall, they observed was of no great weight and substance,--the lightest
man, the Doctor averred, for his size, that ever he had handled.

Every possible care was taken of him, and in a day or two he was able
to walk into the study again, where he sat gazing at the sordidness and
unneatness of the apartment, the strange festoons and drapery of
spiders' webs, the gigantic spider himself, and at the grim Doctor, so
shaggy, grizzly, and uncouth, in the midst of these surroundings, with
a perceptible sense of something very strange in it all. His mild,
gentle regard dwelt too on the two beautiful children, evidently with a
sense of quiet wonder how they should be here, and altogether a sense
of their unfitness; they, meanwhile, stood a little apart, looking at
him, somewhat disturbed and awed, as children usually are, by a sense
that the stranger was not perfectly well, that he had been injured, and
so set apart from the rest of the world.

"Will you come to me, little one?" said he, holding out a delicate hand
to Elsie.

Elsie came to his side without any hesitation, though without any of