Miss Stanbury understood it all as well as though she were in perfect health.  She knew her own failings, was conscious of her worldly tendencies, and perceived that her old servant was thinking of it.  And then sundry odd thoughts, half-digested thoughts, ideas too difficult for her present strength, crossed her brain.  Had it been wicked of her when she was well to hope that a scheming woman should not succeed in betraying a man by her schemes into an ill-assorted marriage; and if not wicked then, was it wicked now because she was ill?  And from that thought her mind travelled on to the ordinary practices of death-bed piety.  Could an assumed devotion be of use to her now, such a devotion as Martha was enjoining upon her from hour to hour, in pure and affectionate solicitude for her soul?  She had spoken one evening of a game of cards, saying that a game of cribbage would have consoled her.  Then Martha, with a shudder, had suggested a hymn, and had had recourse at once to a sleeping draught.  Miss Stanbury had submitted, but had understood it all.  If cards were wicked, she had indeed been a terrible sinner.  What hope could there be now, on her death-bed, for one so sinful?  And she could not repent of her cards, and would not try to repent of them, not seeing the evil of them; and if they were innocent, why should she not have the consolation now when she so much wanted it?  Yet she knew that the whole household, even Dorothy, would be in arms against her, were she to suggest such a thing.  She took the hymn and the sleeping draught, telling herself that it would be best for her to banish such ideas from her mind.  Pastors and masters had laid down for her a mode of living, which she had followed, but indifferently perhaps, but still with an intention of obedience.  They had also laid down a mode of dying, and it would be well that she should follow that as closely as possible.  She would say nothing more about cards.  She would think nothing more of Camilla French.  But, as she so resolved, with intellect half asleep, with her mind wandering between fact and dream, she was unconsciously comfortable with an assurance that if Mr Gibson did marry Camilla French, Camilla French would lead him the very devil of a life.

During three days Dorothy went about the house as quiet as a mouse, sitting nightly at her aunt’s bedside, and tending the sick woman with the closest care.  She, too, had been now and again somewhat startled by the seeming worldliness of her aunt in her illness.  Her aunt talked to her about rents, and gave her messages for Brooke Burgess on subjects which seemed to Dorothy to be profane when spoken of on what might perhaps be a death-bed.  And this struck her the more strongly, because she had a matter of her own on which she would have much wished to ascertain her aunt’s opinion, if she had not thought that it would have been exceedingly wrong of her to trouble her aunt’s mind at such a time by any such matter.  Hitherto she had said not