Their father’s illness imposed a restraint upon trifling conversation.  Mary Woodruff, now attending upon Mr. Lord under the doctor’s directions, had held grave talk with Nancy.  The Barmbys, father and son, called frequently, and went away with gloomy faces.  Nancy and her brother were summoned, separately, to the invalid’s room at uncertain times, but neither was allowed to perform any service for him; their sympathy, more often than not, excited irritation; the sufferer always seemed desirous of saying more than the few and insignificant words which actually passed his lips, and generally, after a long silence, he gave the young people an abrupt dismissal.  With his daughter he spoke at length, in language which awed her by its solemnity; Nancy could only understand him as meaning that his end drew near.  He had been reviewing, he said, the course of her life, and trying to forecast her future.

’I give you no more advice; it would only be repeating what I have said hundreds of times.  All I can do for your good, I have done.  You will understand me better if you live a few more years, and I think, in the end, you will be grateful to me.’

Nancy, sitting by the bedside, laid a hand upon her father’s and sobbed.  She entreated him to believe that even now she understood how wisely he had guided her.

’Tried to, Nancy; tried to, my dear.  Guidance isn’t for young people now-a-days.  Don’t let us shirk the truth.  I have never been satisfied with you, but I have loved you—­’

’And I you, dear father—­I have!  I have!—­I know better now how good your advice was.  I wish—­far, far more sincerely than you think—­that I had kept more control upon myself—­thought less of myself in every way—­’

Whilst she spoke through her tears, the yellow, wrinkled face upon the pillow, with its sunken eyes and wasted lips, kept sternly motionless.

‘If you won’t mock at me,’ Stephen pursued, ’I will show you an example you would do well to imitate.  It is our old servant, now my kindest, truest friend.  If I could hope that you will let her be your friend, it would help to put my mind at rest.  Don’t look down upon her,—­that’s such a poor way of thinking.  Of all the women I have known, she is the best.  Don’t be too proud to learn from her, Nancy.  In all these twenty years that she has been in my house, whatever she undertook to do, she did well;—­nothing too hard or too humble for her, if she thought it her duty.  I know what that means; I myself have been a poor, weak creature, compared with her.  Don’t be offended because I ask you to take pattern by her.  I know her value now better than I ever knew it before.  I owe her a debt I can’t pay.’

Nancy left the room burdened with strange and distressful thoughts.  When she saw Mary she looked at her with new feelings, and spoke to her less familiarly than of wont.  Mary was very silent in these days; her face had the dignity of a profound unspoken grief.