They carried Lady Maulevrier to her bed and laid her there, like a figure carved out of stone.  She was not unconscious.  Her eyes were open, and she moaned every now and then as if in bodily or mental pain.  Once she tried to speak, but had no power to shape a syllable aright, and ended with a shuddering sigh.  Once she lifted her left arm and waved it in the air, as if waving some one off in fear or anger.  The right arm, indeed the whole of the right side, was lifeless, motionless as a stone.  It was a piteous sight to see the beautiful features drawn and distorted, the lips so accustomed to command mouthing the broken syllables of an unknown tongue.  Lady Mary sat beside the bed with clasped hands, praying dumbly, with her eyes fixed on her grandmother’s altered face.

Mr. Horton came, as soon as his stout mountain pony could bring him.  He did not seem surprised at her ladyship’s condition, and accepted the situation with professional calmness.

‘A marked case of hemiplegia,’ he said, when he had observed the symptoms.

‘Will she die?’ asked Mary.

’Oh, dear, no!  She will want great care for a little while, but we shall bring her round easily.  A splendid constitution, a noble frame; but I think she has overworked her brain a little, reading Huxley and Darwin, and the German physiologists upon whom Huxley and Darwin have built themselves.  Metaphysics too.  Schopenhauer, and the rest of them.  A wonderful woman!  Very few brains could hold what hers has had poured into it in the last thirty years.  The conducting nerves between the brain and the spinal marrow have been overworked:  too much activity, too constant a strain.  Even the rails and sleepers on the railroad wear out, don’t you know, if there’s excessive traffic.’

Mr. Horton had known Mary from her childhood, had given her Gregory’s powder, and seen her safely through measles and other infantine ailments, so he was quite at home with her, and at Fellside generally.  Lady Maulevrier had given him a good deal of her confidence during those thirty years in which he had practised as his father’s partner and successor at Grasmere.  He used to tell people that he owed the best part of his education to her ladyship, who condescended to talk to him of the new books she read, and generally gave him a volume to put in his pocket when he was leaving her.

‘Don’t be downhearted, Lady Mary,’ he said; ’I shall come in two or three times a day and see how things are going on, and if I see the slightest difficulty in the case I’ll telegraph for Jenner.’

Mary and the Fraeulein sat up with the invalid all that night.  Lady Maulevrier’s maid was also in attendance, and one of the menservants slept in his clothes on a couch in the corridor, ready for any emergency.  But the night passed peacefully, the patient slept a good deal, and next day there was evident improvement.  The stroke which had prostrated the body, which reduced the vigorous, active