Presently a nurse came with a message that Mr. Hazard was below, and had asked to see Esther for a moment.  Mr. Dudley overheard the message, and whispered to his daughter: 

“Tell him I am sorry not to see him!  Say I am just going out!”

He spoke dreamily, as though half asleep, and Esther, as she leaned over him, trying to catch his words, doubted whether he was quite conscious.  He muttered a few more words:  “I won’t interfere, but the church—.”  She caught no more, and he dozed off again into silence.  After watching him a few moments, Esther beckoned to Catherine to take her chair, and slipped out of the room.  She wanted to see Hazard, for, strange as it seemed to her, he had become her most intimate friend, and she could not send him away at such a moment.

She found him at the foot of the stairs, and there they remained standing for a few moments, talking in low tones, by the light of a dim gas-burner.

“I want to help you,” he said.  “I am used to such scenes and you are not.  You need help though you may not ask for it.”

She shook her head:  “I am a miserable coward,” she said; “but we are beyond help now, and I must learn endurance.”

“You will over-tax your strength,” he urged.  “Remember, there is no excitement so great as to stand for the first time in face of eternity, as you are doing.”

“I suppose it must be so,” she answered.  “Every thing seems unreal.  I can’t even realize my father’s illness.  Your voice sounds far-off, as though you were calling to me out of the distance and darkness.  I hardly know what we are saying, or why we are here.  I never felt so before.”

“It is over-excitement and fatigue,” he replied soothingly.  “Do you feel afraid, too?”

“Terribly!” she answered; “I want to run away.  But I think death excites almost more than it frightens.  My father laughs at it even now.”

“I am more concerned about you,” continued Hazard.  “I can do nothing for him, and you may feel sure that for him all the worst is over.  Will you let me stay here on the chance of your needing help?”

“I have already sent away my aunt and George Strong,” she said.  “Do not feel alarmed about me.  Women have more strength than men.”

As he left the house, he thought to himself that this woman at least had more strength than most men.  He could not forget her pale face, or her dreamy voice and far-off eyes as she had told him her feelings.  Most women would have asked him for religious help and consolation.  She had gently put his offers aside.  She seemed to him like a wandering soul, lost in infinite space, but still floating on, with her quiet air of confidence as though she were a part of nature itself, and felt that all nature moved with her.

“I almost think,” said Hazard to himself, “that she could give a lesson in strength to me.  It seems rather unnecessary, my offering to give one to her.”