Read "The Gates Between" by Elizabeth Stuart Phelps Ward online for free on Textopian. Full text with search, annotations, highlights, and AI-powered reading aids.
Some homesick traveller in a foreign land, where he is known of none and can neither speak nor understand the language of the country; taken ill, let us say, at a remote inn, his strength and credit gone, and he, in pain and fever, hears, one blessed day, the voice of an old friend in the court below. Such a man may think he has -- but I doubt if he have -- some crude conception of the state of feeling in which I found myself, when recognized in this touching manner by my old patient.
My emotion was so great that I could not conceal it; and she, in her own quick and delicate way, perceiving this almost before I did myself, made as if she saw it not, and lightly adding: