'If I could help my wife I'd go, Laura, but as I've often told you, my will to help her was spent long ago; it would be of no use.' Laura's eyes lit up for a moment. 'But if she asks to see me I'll go.' At these words Mrs. Forest's eyes softened, and he began to ask himself how much truth there was in Laura's resolve to go and attend upon his wife in what was no doubt a last agony. Seeing and hearing her put into his head remembrances of an actress, he could not remember which. Her demeanour was as lofty as any and her speech almost rose into blank verse at times; and he began to think that she had missed her vocation in life. It might have been that she was destined by nature for the stage. 'She's more mummer than myself or Kate,' he said to himself, and giving an ear to her outpourings, he recognized in them the rudiments of the grand style: and he admired her transitions--her voice would drop and she seemed to find her way back into homely speech. Her soul seemed to pass back and forwards easily, and Dick did not feel sure which was the real woman and which the fictitious. 'She doesn't know herself,' he said, for at that moment she had left the tripod and was sitting in imagination at the bedside in attendance, looking from the patient to the clock, administering the medicine on the exact time. When Mrs. Rawson spoke about the length of the day and night she answered that she would take her work with her, and bade Dick not to be anxious about the changes he had asked her to make in the second act. 'They shall be made,' she said, 'and without laying myself open to any claim for demurrage.' 'Demurrage' Dick exclaimed. 'She shall have attendance, but a soul ready to depart shouldn't be detained in port longer than is necessary. And Mrs. Rawson would like to let her room to one who has not received her sailing orders, as is the case with your poor wife, Dick,--that is to say, if I understand Mrs. Rawson's account of her illness.' 'She's not here for long,' Mrs. Rawson answered; 'but you mustn't think, ma'am, that I'd lay any under claim for the trouble she's been to me, only what is fair. "Fair is fair all the world over," has been my maxim ever since I started letting apartments. But perhaps, ma'am, you'll be wanting a room in my house. If you do there's the drawing-room floor, which would suit you nicely. But you can't be day nurse and night nurse yourself.' Laura answered that that was true, and talking of a nurse from Charing Cross Hospital they went out of the house together. At the end of the street Laura stopped suddenly. 'But she must have a doctor,' she said, and waited for Mrs. Rawson to recommend one, and Mrs. Rawson replied that the doctor that attended her and her children was out of town.