Her answer was calm enough.  “Not yet, but the place must have been desolate enough for one.  I have sometimes tried to imagine the scene surrounding that broken-down old man.  There was no furniture in the room, save what was indispensable to his bare comfort.  Miss Thankful expressly said there was no carpet,—­you will presently see why.  Even the windows had no other protection than the bare shutters.  But he was in his old home, and seemed content till Miss Charity fell sick, and they had to call in a nurse to assist Miss Thankful, who by this time had a dozen lodgers to look after.  Then he grew very restless.  Miss Thankful said he seemed to be afraid of this nurse, and always had a fever after having been left alone with her; but he gave no reason for his fears, and she herself was too straitened in means and in too much trouble otherwise to be affected by such mere whims, and went on doing her best, sitting with him whenever the opportunity offered, and making every effort to conceal the anxiety she felt for her poor nephew from her equally poor brother.  The disease under which the brother labored was a fatal one, and he had not many days to live.  She was startled when one day her brother greeted her appearance, with an earnest entreaty for the nurse to be sent out for a little while, as this was his last day, and he had something of great importance to communicate to her before he died.

“She had not dreamed of his being so low as this, but when she came to look at him, she saw, that he had not misstated his case, and that he was really very near death.  She was in a flurry and wanted to call in the neighbors and rout her sister up from her own sick bed to care for him.  But he wanted nothing and nobody, only to be left alone with her.

“So she sent the nurse out and sat down on the side of the bed to hear what he had to say to her, for he looked very eager and was smiling in a way to make her heart ache.

“You must remember,” continued Mrs. Packard, “that at the time Miss Thankful was telling this story we were in the very room where it had all happened.  As she reached this part of her narration, she pointed to the wall partitioning off the corridor, and explained that this was where the bed stood,—­an old wooden one brought down from her own attic.

“‘It creaked when I sat down on it,’ said she, ’and I remember that I felt ashamed of its shabby mattress and the poor sheets.  But we had no better,’ she moaned, ‘and he did not seem to mind.’  I tell you this that you may understand what must have taken place in her heart when, a few minutes later, he seized her hand in his and said that he had a great secret to communicate to her.  Though he had seemed the indifferent brother for years, his heart had always been with his home and his people, and he was going to prove it to her now; he had made money, and this money was to be hers and Charity’s.  He had saved it for them, brought it to them from the