Vashti's Fate — page 283: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

278 LIGHTNING-STRUCK. When the anxious physician reached Everleigh, Vashti was raving in delirium—a delirium in which she lived over and over again all the agony, love, remorse, waywardness, and terror of those two years past; in which that strange, intoxicated life she and Frank had led was unfolded like a scroll before the eyes of her listeners. What a life hers had been! What a life that must be which, if ever she recovered her health, she must enter upon ! Dr. Gracie gave no hope that she would ever see again. She would live, he hoped and believed, but the lightning- stroke had indeed sealed her eyes forever from the light of this life. The fever ran high, but abated soon, and as rapidly as it had risen, leaving her a mere wreck of her former self, all her haughty and resentful pride, her stubborn and im- patient spirit broken up. She lay all the day upon her pil- low, feeble as a new-born babe, dependent entirely on the ministrations of others for the merest change of position, and rarely lifting the long, curling lashes from her seared eyeballs. But the expression of her face grew daily a more resigned one, as in her feeble helplessness, her utter pros- tration, with all that had made life beautiful to her, stricken away, she groped blindly to the foot of the mercy-seat, con- tent to wait humbly there till the Divine Hand touched her and the Master said : ‘‘My daughter, be of good cheer, thy sins are forgiven thee.” Then, from the very verge of the grave, she began to mend, and from the faint red of her lips blossomed the old, rare, sweet smile, beautified till it seemed like an an- gel’s smile. With her hand in Nora’s, and Nora’s arm round her,