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The Fiery Trial
by
“Who, love?–who were coming?” eagerly asked Mrs. Wilmer again, her own heart trembling with a recurrence of the vague hopes with which the mysterious letter and timely supply had inspired her,–hopes that had never been hinted to her husband. But it seemed that he had given the incident his own interpretation.
But he heeded not her question. For some time mother and son again stood over him, in troubled silence. Perhaps half an hour had passed since he had spoken, when a slight bustle was heard, on the steps below, and then feet were heard quickly ascending, and hastening along the passage towards their chamber door.
“They come! They come!” half-shrieked the dying man, springing up in the bed, and bending over towards the door, which was hastily flung open. His eyes glared upon the two persons, a man and woman, both well advanced in life, as they entered. That one anxious gaze was enough. Looking up into the face of Constance, against whose breast his head had sunk, his countenance changed into an expression of intense delight, and he whispered–
“They have come, Constance! they have come. Think of me as at rest and happy. I die in peace!”
His eye-lids closed naturally–there was no longer any convulsive play of the muscles, and as an infant sinking into slumber, so quietly did Theodore Wilmer sleep the sleep of death.
One month from that night of sorrow, the darkest one in the many gloomy seasons of Mrs. Wilmer’s life, might have been seen this child of many afflictions, with her three little ones, at home in one of the most pleasant houses in the vicinity of New York. There was something sad and subdued in the expression of her pale face, but it was from the recollection of the past. Her mother, who ten years before had cast her off as unworthy, now gazed upon her with a look of the intensest affection; and the father, who had sworn never to call her his child, sat holding her thin white hand in his, and listening to her first recital of all she had passed through since she left the home of her childhood, while the tears fell from his eyes in large drops, upon the hand that lay within his own.