Winner Stories

Next Winner (18) | Previous Winner (16)

another thought; it was to her only a desperately hard duty which
she had succeeded in doing. Nobody every guessed how much it had
cost her.
The weary time dragged on, days and weeks passed by; Raeburn was
growing weaker, but clung to life with extraordinary tenacity. And
now very bitterly they felt the evils of this voluntarily embraced
poverty, for the summer heat was for a few days almost tropical,
and the tiny little rooms in the lodginghouse were stifling.
Brian was very anxious to have the patient moved across to his
father's house; but, though Charles Osmond said all he could in
favor of the scheme, the other doctors would not consent, thinking
the risk of removal too great. And, besides, it would be useless,
they maintained the atheist was evidently dying. Brian, who was
the youngest, could not carry out his wishes in defiance of the
others, but he would not deny himself the hope of even yet saving
Erica's father. He devised punkahs, became almost nurse and doctor
in one, and utterly refused to lose heart. Erica herself was the
only other person who shared his hopefulness, or perhaps her
feeling could hardly be described by that word; she was not
hopeful, but she had so resolutely set herself to live in the
present that she had managed altogether to crowd out the future,
and with it the worst fear.
One day, however, it broke upon her suddenly. Some one had left a
newspaper in the sickroom; it was weeks since she had seen one,
and in a brief interval, while her father slept, or seemed to
sleep, she took it up half mechanically. How much it would have
interested her a little while ago, how meaningless it all seemed to
her now. Latest Telegrams, News from the Seat of War,
Parliamentary Intelligence a speech by Sir Michael Cunningham,
one of her heroes, on a question in which she was interested. She
could not read it, all the life seemed gone out of it, today the
paper was nothing to her but a broad sheet with so many columns of
printed matter. But as she was putting it down their own name
caught her eye. All at once her benumbed faculties regained their
power, her heart began to beat wildly, for there, in clearest
print, in short, choppy, unequivocal sentences, was the hideous
fear which she had contrived so long to banish.
Mr. Raeburn is dying. The bulletins have daily been growing less
and less hopeful. Yesterday doctor R______, who had been called
in, could only confirm the unfavorable opinion of the other
doctors. In all probability the days of the great apostle of
atheism are numbered. It rests with the Hyde Park rioters, and
those who by word and example have incited them, to bear the

Next Winner (18) | Previous Winner (16)

Winner Index