What were my wrongs, heavy as they had been; what my sufferings, poignant as they still were, that they should stand between this dying woman, and the last hope of awakening her to the consciousness that she was going before the throne of God?  The sole resource for her which human skill and human pity could now suggest, embraced the sole chance that she might still be recovered for repentance, before she was resigned to death.  How did I know, but that in those ceaseless cries which had uttered my name, there spoke the last earthly anguish of the tortured spirit, calling upon me for one drop of water to cool its burning guilt—­one drop from the waters of Peace?

I took up Mr. Bernard’s letter from the floor on which it had fallen, and re-directed it to my brother; simply writing on a blank place in the inside, “I have gone to soothe her last moments.”  Before I departed, I wrote to her father, and summoned him to her bedside.  The guilt of his absence—­if his heartless and hardened nature did not change towards her—­would now rest with him, and not with me.  I forbore from thinking how he would answer my letter; for I remembered his written words to my brother, declaring that he would accuse his daughter of having caused her mother’s death; and I suspected him even then, of wishing to shift the shame of his conduct towards his unhappy wife from himself to his child.

After writing this second letter, I set forth instantly for the house to which Mr. Bernard had directed me.  No thought of myself; no thought, even, of the peril suggested by the ominous disclosure about Mannion, in the postscript to the surgeon’s letter, ever crossed my mind.  In the great stillness, in the heavenly serenity that had come to my spirit, the wasting fire of every sensation which was only of this world, seemed quenched for ever.

It was eleven o’clock when I arrived at the house.  A slatternly, sulky woman opened the door to me.  “Oh!  I suppose you’re another doctor,” she muttered, staring at me with scowling eyes.  “I wish you were the undertaker, to get her out of my house before we all catch our deaths of her!  There! there’s the other doctor coming down stairs; he’ll show you the room—­I won’t go near it.”

As I took the candle from her hand, I saw that Mr. Bernard was approaching me from the stairs.

“You can do no good, I am afraid,” he said, “but I am glad you have come.”

“There is no hope, then?”

“In my opinion, none.  Turner came here this morning, whether she recognised him, or not, in her delirium, I cannot say; but she grew so much worse in his presence, that I insisted on his not seeing her again, except under medical permission.  Just now, there is no one in the room—­are you willing to go up stairs at once?”

“Does she still speak of me in her wanderings?”

“Yes, as incessantly as ever.”

“Then I am ready to go to her bedside.”