Smoothing his pillow, and arranging the bedclothes tidily about him, Marian turned to meet the eyes of both Mr. Cameron and Bell fixed curiously upon her.  With a strange feeling of interest they had watched her, both feeling an aversion to addressing her, and both wondering if she were indeed Genevra, as Katy had affirmed.  They would not ask her, and both breathed more freely when, with a bow in acknowledgment of Mr. Cameron’s compliment to her skill in quieting his son, she left the room.

Neither said what they thought of her, nor was her name once mentioned, but she was not for a moment absent from their minds as they from choice sat that night with Wilford, who slept off his delirium, and lay with his face turned from them, so that they could not guess by its expression what was passing in his mind.

All the next day he maintained the most frigid silence, answering only in monosyllables, while Bell kept wiping away the great drops of sweat constantly oozing out upon his forehead and about the pallid lips.

Just at nightfall he startled Bell by asking that Dr. Grant be sent for.

“Please leave me alone with him,” he said, when Dr. Morris came; then turning to Morris, as the door closed upon his father and his sister, he said, abruptly: 

“Pray for me, if you can pray for one who yesterday hated you so for saying he must die.”

Earnestly, fervently, Morris prayed, as for a dear brother, and when he finished Wilford’s faint “amen” sounded through the room.

“I am not right yet,” the pale lips whispered, as Morris sat down beside him.  “Not right with God, I mean.  I’ve sometimes said there was no God, but I did not believe it, and now I know there is.  He has been moving upon me all the day, driving out my bitterness toward you, and causing me to send for you at last.  Do you think there is hope for me?  I have much to be forgiven.”

“Though your sins be as scarlet they shall be white as snow,” Morris replied; and then, oh, how earnestly he tried to point that erring man to the Lamb of God, who taketh away the sins of the world, convincing him that there was hope even for him, and leaving him with the conviction that God would surely finish the good work begun, nor suffer this soul to be lost which had turned to Him even at the eleventh hour.

Wilford knew his days were numbered, and he talked freely of it to his father and sister the next morning when they came to him.  He did not say that he was ready or willing to die, only that he must, and he asked them to forget, when he was gone, all that had ever been amiss in him as a son and brother.