“My hand is trembling so much that I can hardly hold the pen, but, as usual, in my troubles, I turn to you.  Algy Grey is here.  You, who always understand, will know how much against my will his coming was, but he would come; and you know, poor fellow, how headstrong he is!  I am grieved to tell you that he was taken ill this morning; I sadly fear that it is this wretched low fever that is so much about.  It makes me miserable to leave him!  If I consulted my own wishes, I need not tell you that I should stay and nurse him; but alas!  I know by experience the sharpness of the world’s tongue, and in my situation I dare not brave it; nor would it be fair upon Mr. Huntley that I should.  Ah! what a different world it would be if one might follow one’s own impulses! but one may not, and so I am leaving at once.  I shall be gone before this reaches you.”

I throw the letter down on the floor with a gesture of raging disgust.

“Gone!” I say, with flashing eyes and lifted voice; “is it possible that, after having decoyed him there, she is leaving him now to die, alone?”

“So it seems,” he answers, looking back at me with an indignation hardly inferior to my own.  “I could not have believed it of her.”

“He will die!” I say a moment after, forgetting Mrs. Huntley, and breaking into a storm of tears.  “I know he will!  I always said we were too prosperous.  Nothing has ever happened to us.  None of us have ever gone!  I know he will die; and I said yesterday that I liked him the least of all the boys.  Oh, I wish I had not said it.—­Barbara!  Barbara!  I wish I had not said it.”

For Barbara has entered, and is standing silently listening.  The roses in her cheeks have paled, indeed, and her blue eyes look large and frightened; but, unlike me, she makes no crying fuss.  With noiseless dispatch she arranges every thing for our departure.  Neither will she hear of Algy’s dying.  He will get better.  We will go to him at once—­all three of us—­and will nurse him so well that he will soon be himself again; and whatever happens (with a kindling of the eye, and godly lightening of all her gentle face), is not God here—­God our friend?  This is what she keeps saying to me in a soft and comforting whisper during our short transit, with her slight arm thrown round me as I sob in helpless wretchedness on her shoulder.  It is very foolish, very childish of me, but I cannot get it out of my head, that I said I liked him the least.  It haunts me still when I stand by his bedside, when I see his poor cheeks redder than mine were when they wore their rouge, when I notice the hot drought of his parched lips.  It haunts me still with disproportioned remorse through all the weeks of his illness.

For the time stretches itself out to weeks—­abnormal, weary weeks, when the boundaries of day and night confound themselves—­when each steps over into his brother’s territories—­when it grows to feel natural, wakefully, to watch the candle’s ghostly shadows, flickering at midnight, and to snatch fitful sleeps at noon! to watch the autumnal dawns coldly breaking in the gloom of the last, and to have the stars for companions.