its dissolution has gone forth, struck her at once.  Never yet had Elizabeth seen death.  Her father’s she did not remember, and among her few friends and connections none other had occurred.  At twenty-three years of age she was still ignorant of that solemn experience which every woman must go through some time, often many times during her life.  For it is to women that all look in their extreme hour.  Very few men, even the tenderest hearted, are able to watch by the last struggle and close the eyes of the dying.

For the moment, as she glanced round the darkened room, and then at the still figure on the bed, Elizabeth’s courage failed.  Strong love might have overcome this fear—­the natural recoil of youth and life from coming into contact with death and mortality; but love was not exactly the bond between her and Mrs. Ascott.  It was rather duty, pity, the tenderness that would have sprung up in her heart toward any body she had watched and tended so long.

“If she should die, die in the night, before Miss Hilary comes!” thought the poor girl, and glanced once more around the shadowy room, where she was now left quite alone.  For nurse, thinking with true worldly wisdom of the preservation of the “son and heir,” which was decidedly the most important question now, had stolen away, and was busy in the next room, seeing various young women whom the doctors had sent, one of whom was to supply to the infant the place of the poor mother whom it would never know.  There was nobody left but herself to watch this dying mother, so Elizabeth took her lot upon her, smothered down her fears, and sat by the bedside waiting for the least expression of returning reason in the sunken face, which was very quiet now.  Consciousness did return at last, as the doctors had said it would.  Mrs. Ascott opened her eyes; they wandered from side to side, and then she said, feebly, “Elizabeth, where’s my baby?”

What Elizabeth answered she never could remember; perhaps nothing, or her agitation betrayed her, for Mrs. Ascott said again, “Elizabeth, am I going to—­to leave my baby?”

Some people might have considered it best to reply with a lie—­the frightened, cowardly lie that is so often told at death-beds to the soul passing direct to its God.  But this girl could not and dared not.

Leaning over her mistress, she whispered as softly as she could, choking down the tears that might have disturbed the peace which, mercifully, seemed to have come with dying,

“Yes, you are going very soon—­to God.  He will watch over baby, and give him back to you again some day quite safe.”

“Will He?”

The tone was submissive, half-inquiring; like that of a child learning something it had never learned before—­as Selina was now learning.  Perhaps even those three short weeks of motherhood had power so to raise her whole nature that she now gained the composure with which even the weakest soul can sometimes meet death, and had grown not unworthy of the dignity of a Christian’s dying.