Lionel went indoors and passed upstairs with a heavy footstep.  Lucy started from her place, but not before he had seen her in it.

“Why do you sit there, Lucy?”

“I don’t know,” she answered, blushing that he should have caught her there, though she had not cared for Jan’s doing so.  “It is lonely downstairs to-day; here I can ask everybody who comes out of the room how she is.  I wish I could cure her!  I wish I could do anything for her!”

He laid his hand lightly on her head as he passed.  “Thank you for all, my dear child!” and there was a strange tone of pain in his low voice as he spoke it.

Only Decima was in the room then, and she quitted it as Lionel entered.  Treading softly across the carpet, he took his seat in a chair opposite Sibylla’s couch.  She slept—­for a great wonder—­or appeared to sleep.  The whole morning long—­nay, the whole night long, her bright, restless eyes had been wide open; sleep as far from her as it could well be.  It had seemed that her fractious temper kept the sleep away.  But her eyes were closed now, and two dark, purple rims inclosed them, terribly dark on the wan, white face.  Suddenly the eyes unclosed with a start, as if her doze had been abruptly disturbed, though Lionel had been perfectly still.  She looked at him for a minute or two in silence, and he, knowing it would be well that she should doze again, neither spoke nor moved.

“Lionel, am I dying?”

Quietly as the words were spoken, they struck on his ear with startling intensity.  He rose then and pushed her hair from her damp brow with a fond hand, murmuring some general inquiry as to how she felt.

“Am I dying?” came again from the panting lips.

What was he to answer her?  To say that she was dying might send her into a paroxysm of terror; to deceive her in that awful hour by telling her she was not, went against every feeling of his heart.

“But I don’t want to die,” she urged, in some excitement, interpreting his silence to mean the worst.  “Can’t Jan do anything for me?  Can’t Dr. Hayes?”

“Dr. Hayes will be here soon,” observed Lionel soothingly, if somewhat evasively.  “He will come by the next train.”

She took his hand, held it between hers, and looked beseechingly up to his face.  “I don’t want to leave you,” she whispered.  “Oh, Lionel! keep me here if you can!  You know you are always kind to me.  Sometimes I have reproached you that you were not, but it was not true.  You have been ever kind, have you not?”

“I have ever striven to be so,” he answered, the tears glistening on his eyelashes.

“I don’t want to die.  I want to get well and go about again, as I used to do when at Verner’s Pride.  Now Sir Edmund Hautley is come home, that will be a good place to visit at.  Lionel, I don’t want to die! Can’t you keep me in life?”

“If by sacrificing my own life, I could save yours, Heaven knows how willingly I would do it,” he tenderly answered.