How quiet and measured were his words; but even in her distress she was painfully conscious that the slight tremor in his voice was the low vibration of a feeling whose repressed intensity would sooner or later break forth.  Beyond a momentary shrinking from what seemed to her but well-mastered vehemence, she gave him no thought in her overwhelming solicitude.

Scarcely a moment elapsed before she joined him at the door.  As he placed her in the carriage he said, “Dr. Benton will explain to you what has happened.”

“Roger—­” sobbed Belle, but he sprang on the box with the driver, and in a few moments they were at the door of the old mansion.

“Dr. Benton,” said the young man, “will you please accompany Miss Jocelyn?  After the fatigue of the day and the shock of this evening she will need your support,” and he saw that she leaned heavily on the physician’s arm.

Having dismissed the carriage, he found Belle leaning against the side of the house, faint and trembling.  The young athlete lifted her in his arms and bore her steadily and easily to the doorway, and then again up the winding stairway.  “Belle,” he whispered, “if you lose your father you shall at least have a brother.”

She entwined her arm about his neck in mute acceptance of the relationship.  Her every breath was a low sob, and she could not then tell him how his words reassured her, taking away, in part, the almost overwhelming terror of being left unprotected in the world.

During Mr. Jocelyn’s absence his family had tried to banish from their minds the memory of his weakness, and thus they had come to think of him again as the strong, cheerful, genial man they had known all their lives.  The months preceding his departure were like a hateful dream.  It had been a dearly cherished hope that, after breathing his native air for a few weeks, he would return the same frank, clear-eyed, clear-brained man that had won his way, even among strangers, after the wreck and ruin of the war.  To him their thoughts had turned daily, in the hope of release from toil that was often torture, and from anxieties that filled every waking hour with foreboding.

How bitter the disappointment then, and how terrible the shock, as they now looked upon his prostrate form, meagre, shrunken, and almost lifeless!  Instead of the full, dark eyes that had beamed mirthfully and lovingly for so many years, there was an unnatural contraction of the pupils which rendered them almost invisible.  His once healthful complexion was now livid, or rather of a leaden, bluish hue; his respirations stertorous and singularly deliberate.

“He is dying,” Mildred moaned; “he is far, far away from us, even now.  Oh, if we could have but one look, one sign of farewell!”

Belle and Mrs. Jocelyn became almost helpless with grief, for it did not seem possible to them that he could rally.  “Oh, why did I let him go—­why did I let him go!” was the wife’s remorseful and often-repeated question.