The faithful creature’s prejudice wronged one of the hated pair.  Mrs. Aylett’s slumbers upon her downy couch might be none the less serene for her sister-in-law’s danger, but Herbert’s was the sleep of exhaustion, not callousness.  He had been up all the previous night, and racked by the wildest anxiety throughout the intervening day, and to compass this vigil was beyond his physical powers.  Mabel would not miss him, and he could do nothing for her—­would only be in the way, being totally unpractised in the art of nursing, he reasoned; and there was no telling what new draught upon his strength the morrow might bring.  He would just lie down for an hour; then he would be fresh for whatever service might be required of him.  With this prudent resolve, he threw himself along the bed in the spare-room, and was oblivious of everything sublunary until sunrise.

“If there should be any change, call me!” Mrs. Aylett had enjoined, plaintively.  “Winston will not hear of my sitting up, but I shall not close my eyes all night, so do not hesitate to disturb me, if I can be of any use whatever.”

Which, it is idle to remark, was the last thing either of the nurses thought of doing.  If their darling were, in truth, dying, they were the fittest persons to receive her latest sigh; for had they not been present at her birth, and did not her mother go to glory from their supporting arms?

There was a change, and not a favorable one, before daybreak.  The patient, from mutterings and restless starts, passed into violent delirium, laughing, crying, and singing in a style so opposed to the prescribed diagnosis of her case, as to lash the provincial doctor to his wits’ end, and extinguish in Aunt Rachel’s sanguine heart the faint hope to which she had clung until now.  Herbert, awakened finally by the turbulent sounds from the room he had been told must be kept perfectly quiet, jumped up, and showed himself, with disordered hair and blinking eyes, in the door of communication, just as Mabel struggled to rise, and pleaded weepingly with those who held her down that they would restore her child to her.

“I had her in my arms not a moment ago!” she insisted.  “See! the print of her little head is here on my breast!  You have taken her away among you!  I saw it all—­those who ordered that it should be done and those who did it, when I was too weak to hold her, or to keep them back!”

And passing from the height of furious invective to deadly and earnest calm, she told them off upon her fingers.

“Clara Aylett!  Rosa Tazewell!  Winston Aylett! (he married Clara Louise Dorrance, you know!) Herbert Dorrance!  Julius Lennox!”

The household was astir by this time, and Mrs. Aylett entered from the hall as her brother did from his bedroom.  There was but one spectator who was sufficiently composed to note and marvel at the scared look exchanged by the two at the sound of the last name.  This was Mr. Aylett, who, from his position behind his wife, had an excellent view of all the actors in the exciting tableau before she fell back, swooning, in his arms.