that some ill had occurred to Clara or Evelyn, rather than to this aged lady.  Our fears, for ever on the stretch, demanded a nourishment of horror; and it seemed too natural an occurrence, too like past times, for the old to die before the young.  I found the venerable mother of my Idris lying on a couch, her tall emaciated figure stretched out; her face fallen away, from which the nose stood out in sharp profile, and her large dark eyes, hollow and deep, gleamed with such light as may edge a thunder cloud at sun-set.  All was shrivelled and dried up, except these lights; her voice too was fearfully changed, as she spoke to me at intervals.  “I am afraid,” said she, “that it is selfish in me to have asked you to visit the old woman again, before she dies:  yet perhaps it would have been a greater shock to hear suddenly that I was dead, than to see me first thus.”

I clasped her shrivelled hand:  “Are you indeed so ill?” I asked.

“Do you not perceive death in my face,” replied she, “it is strange; I ought to have expected this, and yet I confess it has taken me unaware.  I never clung to life, or enjoyed it, till these last months, while among those I senselessly deserted:  and it is hard to be snatched immediately away.  I am glad, however, that I am not a victim of the plague; probably I should have died at this hour, though the world had continued as it was in my youth.”

She spoke with difficulty, and I perceived that she regretted the necessity of death, even more than she cared to confess.  Yet she had not to complain of an undue shortening of existence; her faded person shewed that life had naturally spent itself.  We had been alone at first; now Clara entered; the Countess turned to her with a smile, and took the hand of this lovely child; her roseate palm and snowy fingers, contrasted with relaxed fibres and yellow hue of those of her aged friend; she bent to kiss her, touching her withered mouth with the warm, full lips of youth.  “Verney,” said the Countess, “I need not recommend this dear girl to you, for your own sake you will preserve her.  Were the world as it was, I should have a thousand sage precautions to impress, that one so sensitive, good, and beauteous, might escape the dangers that used to lurk for the destruction of the fair and excellent.  This is all nothing now.

“I commit you, my kind nurse, to your uncle’s care; to yours I entrust the dearest relic of my better self.  Be to Adrian, sweet one, what you have been to me—­enliven his sadness with your sprightly sallies; sooth his anguish by your sober and inspired converse, when he is dying; nurse him as you have done me.”

Clara burst into tears; “Kind girl,” said the Countess, “do not weep for me.  Many dear friends are left to you.”

“And yet,” cried Clara, “you talk of their dying also.  This is indeed cruel —­how could I live, if they were gone?  If it were possible for my beloved protector to die before me, I could not nurse him; I could only die too.”