Open your eyes, Madeline Payne; lift up your voice in thanksgiving; you have come back to the world. Back where the sun shines and the dew falls; where the flowers are shedding their perfume and song birds are making glad music; where men make merry and women smile; where gold shapes itself into palaces and fame wreathes crowns for fair and noble brows; where beauty crowns valor and valor kisses the lips of beauty. And where the rivers sparkle in the sunlight, and, sometimes, yield up from their embrace cold, dripping, dead things, that yet bear the semblance of your kind—all that is left of beings that were once like you! Out of danger! Where want, and poverty, and—God help us!—vice, hide their heads in dim alleys and under smoky garret roofs. Where beaten mothers and starving children dare hardly aspire to the pure air and sunlight, the whole world for them being enshrined in a crust of bread. Where thieves mount upwards on ladders beaten from pilfered gold, and command cities and sway nations.[107] Where wantonness laughs and thrives in gilded cages, and starves and dies in mouldy cellars. [107] Out of danger! Madeline, the place that was almost yours, in the land of the unknowable, is given to another. The waters of death have cast you back upon the shores of the living. You are "out of danger!" What was to become of Madeline, now that they had brought her back to life? This was a question which occurred to the two who so kindly interested themselves in the fate of the unknown and headstrong girl. While they planned a little, as was only natural, yet they knew from what they had seen of their charge that, decide for her how they would, only so far as that decision corresponded with her own inclinations would she abide by it. So they left Madeline's future for Madeline to decide, and found occupation for their kindliness in ministering to her needs of the present. Once during her illness, and just as the light of reason had returned to the lovely hazel eyes, Lucian Davlin came. But he found the door of the sick chamber closely shut and closely guarded. The slightest shock to her nerves would be fatal now,—they told him. And he, having done the proper thing, as he termed it, and not being in any way fond of the sight of pain and pallor, yielded with a graceful simulation of reluctance. Having been assured that with careful nursing, there was nothing to fear, he deposited a check on his bankers in the
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