He recalled that day when he saw her a bride.

He remembered the sweet, proud dignity of her young wifehood.

He saw her, again, when her face shone with the glad triumph and the holy joy of motherhood.
The old physician turned from his patient, to look with sorrowful eyes about the room that was to witness the end.
Why was such a woman dying like this?
Why was a life of such rich mental and spiritual endowments--of such wealth of true culture--coming to its close in such material poverty?
The doctor was one of the few who knew.

He was one of the few who understood that, to the woman herself, it was necessary.
There were those who--without understanding, for the sake of the years that were gone--would have surrounded her with the material comforts to which, in her younger days, she had been accustomed.

The doctor knew that there was one--a friend of her childhood, famous, now, in the world of books--who would have come from the ends of the earth to care for her.