Then arose the thought that with weakness she should lose all chance of expressing a wish, and, obtaining pencil and paper, she began to write a charge to her mother and sister to provide for Mary Morris; but in the midst there came over her the remembrance of the papers that she had placed in Mauleverer’s hands—­the title-deeds of the Burnaby Bargain; an estate that perhaps ought to be bringing in as much as half the rental of the property.  It must be made good to the poor.  If the title-deeds had been sold to any one who could claim the property, what would be the consequence?  She felt herself in a mist of ignorance and perplexity; dreading the consequences, yet feeling as if her own removal might leave her fortune free to make up for them.  She tried to scrawl an explanation; but mind and fingers were alike unequal to the task, and she desisted just as fresh torture began at the doctor’s hands—­torture from which they sent her mother away, and that left her exhausted, and despairing of holding out through a repetition.

And then—­and then!  “Tell me of my Saviour,” the dying child had said; and the drawn face had lightened at the words to which Rachel’s oracles declared that people attached crude or arbitrary meanings; and now she hardly knew what they conveyed to her, and longed, as for something far away, for the reality of those simple teachings—­once realities, now all by rote!  Saved by faith!  What was faith?  Could all depend on a last sensation?  And as to her life.  Failure, failure through headstrong blindness and self-will, resulting in the agony of the innocent.  Was this ground of hope?  She tried to think of progress and purification beyond the grave; but this was the most speculative, insecure fabric of all.  There was no habit of trust to it—­no inward conviction, no outward testimony.  And even when the extreme danger subsided, and Francis Temple was known to be better, Rachel found that her sorrow was not yet ended:  for Conrade had been brought home with the symptoms of the complaint—­Conrade, the most beloved and loving of Fanny’s little ones, the only one who really remembered his father, was in exceeding, almost hopeless peril, watched day and night by his mother and Miss Williams.

The little Alice, Maria Hatherton’s own child, had lingered and struggled long, but all the care and kindness of the good Sisters at St. Norbert’s had been unavailing, she had sunk at last, and the mother remained in a dull, silent, tearless misery, quietly doing all that was required of her, but never speaking nor giving the ladies any opening to try to make an impression upon her.

Rachel gleaned more intelligence than her mother meant her to obtain, and brooded over it in her weakness and her silence.