spoke but few words; they were too much exhausted by their terror to do more than decide upon the immediate course of action.  Mr. Hale was resolved to sit up through the night, and all that Margaret could do was to prevail upon him to rest on the drawing-room sofa.  Dixon stoutly and bluntly refused to go to bed; and, as for Margaret, it was simply impossible that she should leave her mother, let all the doctors in the world speak of ‘husbanding resources,’ and ‘one watcher only being required.’  So, Dixon sat, and stared, and winked, and drooped, and picked herself up again with a jerk, and finally gave up the battle, and fairly snored.  Margaret had taken off her gown and tossed it aside with a sort of impatient disgust, and put on her dressing-gown.  She felt as if she never could sleep again; as if her whole senses were acutely vital, and all endued with double keenness, for the purposes of watching.  Every sight and sound—­nay, even every thought, touched some nerve to the very quick.  For more than two hours, she heard her father’s restless movements in the next room.  He came perpetually to the door of her mother’s chamber, pausing there to listen, till she, not hearing his close unseen presence, went and opened it to tell him how all went on, in reply to the questions his baked lips could hardly form.  At last he, too, fell asleep, and all the house was still.  Margaret sate behind the curtain thinking.  Far away in time, far away in space, seemed all the interests of past days.  Not more than thirty-six hours ago, she cared for Bessy Higgins and her father, and her heart was wrung for Boucher; now, that was all like a dreaming memory of some former life;—­everything that had passed out of doors seemed dissevered from her mother, and therefore unreal.  Even Harley Street appeared more distinct; there she remembered, as if it were yesterday, how she had pleased herself with tracing out her mother’s features in her Aunt Shaw’s face,—­and how letters had come, making her dwell on the thoughts of home with all the longing of love.  Helstone, itself, was in the dim past.  The dull gray days of the preceding winter and spring, so uneventless and monotonous, seemed more associated with what she cared for now above all price.  She would fain have caught at the skirts of that departing time, and prayed it to return, and give her back what she had too little valued while it was yet in her possession.  What a vain show Life seemed!  How unsubstantial, and flickering, and flitting!  It was as if from some aerial belfry, high up above the stir and jar of the earth, there was a bell continually tolling, ’All are shadows!—­all are passing!—­all is past!’ And when the morning dawned, cool and gray, like many a happier morning before—­when Margaret looked one by one at the sleepers, it seemed as if the terrible night were unreal as a dream; it, too, was a shadow.  It, too, was past.