By degrees, however, his fit of brooding gave way to one of sullen fury against his wife, himself, but most of all against his dead father.  Drunk with excitement, rage, and baffled avarice, he seized and candle and staggered up to the room where the corpse had been laid, launching imprecations as he went at his dead father’s head.  But when he came face to face with that dread Presence his passion died, and a cold sense of the awful quiet and omnipotence of death came upon him and chilled him into fear.  In some indistinct way he realized how impotent is the chafing of the waters of Mortality against the iron-bound coasts of Death.  To what purpose did he rail against that solemn quiet thing, that husk and mask of life which lay in unmoved mockery of his reviling?

His father was dead, and he, even he, had killed his father.  He was his father’s murderer.  And then a terror of the reckoning that must one day be struck between that dead man’s spirit and his own took possession of him, and a foreknowledge of the awful shadow under which he must henceforth live crept into his mind and froze the very marrow in his bones.  He looked again at the face, and, to his excited imagination, it appeared to have assumed a sardonic smile.  The curse of Cain fell upon him as he looked, and weighed him down; his hair rose, and the cold sweat poured from his forehead.  At length he could bear it no longer, but, turning, fled out of the room and out of the house, far into the night.

When, haggard with mental and bodily exhaustion, he at length returned, it was after midnight.  He found Dr. Caley waiting for him; he had just come from the sick-room and wore an anxious look upon his face.

“Your wife has been delivered of a fine girl,” he said; “but I am bound to tell you that her condition is far from satisfactory.  The case is a most complicated and dangerous one.”

“A girl!” groaned Philip, mindful of the will.  “Are you sure that it is a girl?”

“Of course I am sure,” answered the doctor, testily.

“And Hilda ill—­I don’t understand.”

“Look here, my good fellow, you are upset; take a glass of brandy and go to bed.  Your wife does not wish to see you now, but, if necessary, I will send for you.  Now, do as I tell you, or you will be down next.  Your nerves are seriously shaken.”

Philip did as he was bid, and, as soon as he had seen him off to his room, the doctor returned upstairs.

In the early morning he sent for two of his brother-practitioners, and they held a consultation, the upshot of which was that they had come to the conclusion nothing short of a miracle could save Hilda’s life—­ a conclusion that she herself had arrived at some hours before.

“Doctor,” she said, “I trust to you to let me know when the end is near.  I wish my husband to be present when I die, but not before.”

“Hush, my child—­never talk of dying yet.  Please God, you have many years of life before you.”