Shelley enabled Beauchamp to make the same discovery, with regard to Kate's peculiar constitution, on the verge of which Alec had lingered so long. For upon one occasion, when he quoted a few lines from the Sensitive Plant--if ever there was a Sensitive Plant in the human garden, it was Kate--she turned "white with the whiteness of what is dead," shuddered, and breathed as if in the sensible presence of something disgusting. And the cunning Celt perceived in this emotion not merely an indication of what he must avoid, but a means as well of injuring him whose rival he had become for the sake of injury. Both to uncle and niece he had always spoken of Alec in familiar and friendly manner; and now, he would occasionally drop a word or two with reference to him and break off with a laugh. "What _do_ you mean, Mr Beauchamp?" said Kate on one of these occasions. "I was only thinking how Forbes would enjoy some lines I found in Shelley yesterday." "What are they?" "Ah, I must not repeat them to you. You would turn pale again, and it would kill me to see your white face." Whereupon Kate pressed the question no further, and an additional feeling of discomfort associated itself with the name of Alec Forbes. CHAPTER LXVIII. I have said that Mrs Forbes brought Annie home with her. For several months she lay in her own little room at Howglen. Mrs Forbes was dreadfully anxious about her, often fearing much that her son's heroism had only prolonged the process--that she was dying notwithstanding from the effects of that awful night. At length on a morning in February, the first wave of the feebly returning flow of the life-tide visited her heart, and she opened her eyes, seekingly. Through her little window, at which in summer she knew that the honeysuckle leaned in as if peeping and hearkening, she saw the country wrapt in a winding-sheet of snow, through which patches of bright green had begun to dawn, just as her life had begun to show its returning bloom above the wan waves of death.--Sickness is just a fight between life and death.--A thrill of gladness, too pleasant to be borne without tears, made her close her eyes. They throbbed and ached beneath their lids, and the hot tears ran down her cheeks. It was not gladness for this reason or for that, but the essential gladness of being that made her weep: there lay the world, white and green; and here lay she, faint and alive. And nothing was wanting to the gladness and kindness of Mrs Forbes but the indescribable aroma of motherhood, which she was not divine-woman enough to generate, save towards the offspring of her own body; and that Annie did not miss much, because all knowledge she had of such "heavenly health" was associated with the memory of her father.