This was the last prayer to which the Little Gentleman ever listened.  Some change was rapidly coming over him during this last hour of which I have been speaking.  The excitement of pleading his cause before his self-elected spiritual adviser,—­the emotion which overcame him, when the young girl obeyed the sudden impulse of her feelings and pressed her lips to his cheek,—­the thoughts that mastered him while the divinity-student poured out his soul for him in prayer, might well hurry on the inevitable moment.  When the divinity-student had uttered his last petition, commending him to the Father through his Son’s intercession, he turned to look upon him before leaving his chamber.  His face was changed.—­There is a language of the human countenance which we all understand without an interpreter, though the lineaments belong to the rudest savage that ever stammered in an unknown barbaric dialect.  By the stillness of the sharpened features, by the blankness of the tearless eyes, by the fixedness of the smileless mouth, by the deadening tints, by the contracted brow, by the dilating nostril, we know that the soul is soon to leave its mortal tenement, and is already closing up its windows and putting out its fires.—­Such was the aspect of the face upon which the divinity-student looked, after the brief silence which followed his prayer.  The change had been rapid, though not that abrupt one which is liable to happen at any moment in these cases.—­The sick man looked towards him.—­Farewell,—­he said,—­I thank you.  Leave me alone with her.

When the divinity-student had gone, and the Little Gentleman found himself alone with Iris, he lifted his hand to his neck, and took from it, suspended by a slender chain, a quaint, antique-looking key,—­the same key I had once seen him holding.  He gave this to her, and pointed to a carved cabinet opposite his bed, one of those that had so attracted my curious eyes and set me wondering as to what it might contain.

Open it,—­he said,—­and light the lamp.—­The young girl walked to the cabinet and unlocked the door.  A deep recess appeared, lined with black velvet, against which stood in white relief an ivory crucifix.  A silver lamp hung over it.  She lighted the lamp and came back to the bedside.  The dying man fixed his eyes upon the figure of the dying Saviour.—­Give me your hand, he said; and Iris placed her right hand in his left.  So they remained, until presently his eyes lost their meaning, though they still remained vacantly fixed upon the white image.  Yet he held the young girl’s hand firmly, as if it were leading him through some deep-shadowed valley and it was all he could cling to.  But presently an involuntary muscular contraction stole over him, and his terrible dying grasp held the poor girl as if she were wedged in an engine of torture.  She pressed her lips together and sat still.  The inexorable hand held her tighter and tighter, until she felt as if her own slender fingers would be crushed