Winifred had no amenable patient.  Weak and depressed as Albinia was, her restlessness and air of anxiety could not be appeased.  There was a look of being constantly on the watch, and once, when her door was ajar, before Winifred was aware she exerted her voice to call Gilbert!

Pushing the door just wide enough to enter, and treading almost noiselessly, he came forward, looking from side to side as with a sense of guilt.  She stretched out her hand and smiled, and he obeyed the movement that asked him to bend and kiss her, but still durst not speak.

‘Let me have the baby,’ she said.

Mrs. Ferrars laid it beside her, and held aloof.  Gilbert’s eyes were fixed intently on it.

‘Yes, Gilbert,’ Albinia said, ’I know what you will feel for him.  He can’t be what you once had—­but oh, Gilbert, you will do all that an elder brother can to make him like Edmund!’

Gilbert wrung her fingers, and ventured to stoop down to kiss the little red forehead.  The tears were running down his cheeks, and he could not speak.

’If your father might only say the same of him! that he never grieved him!’ said Albinia; ‘but oh, Gilbert—­example,’ and then, pausing and gazing searchingly in his face, ‘You have not told papa.’

‘No,’ whispered Gilbert.

‘Winifred,’ said Albinia, ’would you be so kind as to ask papa to come?’

Winifred was forced to obey, though feeling much to blame as Mr. Kendal rose with a sigh of uneasiness.  Gilbert still stood with his hand clasped in Albinia’s, and she held it while her weak voice made the full confession for him, and assured his father of his shame and sorrow.  There needed no such assurance, his whole demeanour had been sorrow all these dreary days, and Mr. Kendal could not but forgive, though his eye spoke deep grief.

‘I could not refuse pardon thus asked,’ he said.  ’Oh, Gilbert, that I could hope this were the beginning of a new course!’

Albinia looked from Gilbert to his little brother, and back again to Gilbert.

‘It shall be,’ she said, and Gilbert’s resolution was perhaps the more sincere that he spoke no word.

‘Poor boy,’ said Albinia, half to herself and half aloud, ’I think I feel more strong to love and to help him!’

That interview was a dangerous experiment, and she suffered for it.  As her brother said, instead of having too little life, she had too much, and could not let herself rest; she had never cultivated the art of being still, and when she was weak, she could not be calm.

Still the strength of her constitution staved off the nervous fever of her spirits, and though she was not at all a comfortable patient, she made a certain degree of progress, so that though it was not easy to call her better, she was not quite so ill, and grew less irrational in her solicitude, and more open to other ideas.  ’Do you know, Winifred,’ she said one day, ’I have been thinking myself at Fairmead till I almost believed I heard John Smith’s voice under the window.’