At length, however, he wrote his prescription, and promised to return at nine o’clock.  I remember there was something to be rubbed along her spine, and some medicines beside.

But these remedies were as entirely unavailing as the others.  In a state of dismay and distraction we watched by the bed in which, in accordance with the physician’s direction, we had placed her.  The absolute changelessness of her condition filled us with despair.  The day which had elapsed had not witnessed even a transitory variation in the dreadful character of her seizure.  Any change, even a change for the worse, would have been better than this sluggish, hopeless monotony of suffering.

At the appointed hour the physician returned.  He appeared disappointed, almost shocked, at the failure of his prescriptions.  On feeling her pulse he declared that she must have a little wine.  There had been a wonderful prostration of all the vital powers since he had seen her before.  He evidently thought the case a strange and precarious one.

She was made to swallow the wine, and her pulse rallied for a time, but soon subsided again.  I and the physician were standing by the fire, talking in whispers of the darling child’s symptoms, and likelihood of recovery, when we were arrested in our conversation by a cry of anguish from the poor mother, who had never left the bedside of her little child, and this cry broke into bitter and convulsive weeping.

The poor little child had, on a sudden, stretched down her little hands and feet, and died.  There is no mistaking the features of death:  the filmy eye and dropt jaw once seen, are recognised whenever we meet them again.  Yet, spite of our belief, we cling to hope; and the distracted mother called on the physician, in accents which might have moved a statue, to say that her darling was not dead, not quite dead—­that something might still be done—­that it could not be all over.  Silently he satisfied himself that no throb of life still fluttered in that little frame.

“It is, indeed, all over,” he said, in tones scarce above a whisper; and pressing my hand kindly, he said, “comfort your poor wife”; and so, after a momentary pause, he left the room.

This blow had smitten me with stunning suddenness.  I looked at the dead child, and from her to her poor mother.  Grief and pity were both swallowed up in transports of fury and detestation with which the presence in my house of the wretch who had wrought all this destruction and misery filled my soul.  My heart swelled with ungovernable rage; for a moment my habitual fear of him was neutralised by the vehemence of these passions.  I seized a candle in silence, and mounted the stairs.  The sight of the accursed cat, flitting across the lobby, and the loneliness of the hour, made me hesitate for an instant.  I had, however, gone so far, that shame sustained me.  Overcoming a momentary thrill of dismay, and determined to repel and defy the influence that had so long awed me, I knocked sharply at the door, and, almost at the same instant, pushed it open, and entered our lodger’s chamber.