‘Not friendless! I have no friend but you. The earth would be empty for me if you were gone. Oh, my boy, my boy, do you think that I could go on living without you?’ Cyril overheard these two speeches. He had knocked gently, and, receiving no answer, had softly opened the door. The neighbours, a family of nine, in the front room, had told him of Emmanuel’s state. ‘Oh, sir,’ cried the widow, turning to him with streaming eyes, ‘it has come. You know how I dreaded it--how I have prayed against it. I thought God would have mercy, that the scourge would pass by this door, as the angel of death passed by the doors that were sprinkled with the blood of the Lamb. But He has been deaf to my prayers.’ ‘He is never deaf to prayer, though He may not give us the answer we desire,’ said Cyril, gently. ‘Do not give way to despair. With God’s grace your son will recover, as so many have done.’ ‘But how many have died!’ said the widow, sadly, as she resumed her seat by her son’s pillow. Cyril stayed for more than an hour, comforting both the sick man and his mother by his presence. He said very little to Emmanuel, for the sufferer was in no state to talk or to be talked to. It was one of those cases in which a death-bed repentance--a calm survey of past errors and sins--a deliberate act of allegiance to God--was not to be expected. The sinking soul might clutch at the cross held aloft before those dim eyes, as a drowning man catches at the rope flung out to him at his last extremity; but any act involving thought, any calm reception of divine truth, was impossible. To Cyril’s eye the young man seemed already sinking. He opened his book by and by without a word of preface, and read those chapters of St. John’s gospel which contain Christ’s parting address to His disciples--words whose pathetic minor seems to breathe sad sweetness into dying ears. Emmanuel’s face brightened as he heard. He remembered how he had loved those chapters long ago, when he had read them at his mother’s knee, before his father’s severity and the hard ascetic life had made all religions reading hateful to him. ‘Yes,’ he murmured presently, in an interval of pain. ‘That is a lovely farewell. Those used to be your favourite chapters, mother.’ ‘They are so still, dear. I have never tired of them.’ Cyril left with a heavy heart, promising to call in the evening, at the hour when he would be likely to meet the doctor. That anguish-wrung countenance of the widow’s haunted him all day long. In the places where he went there was little else but sorrow, but there seemed to him to be no burthen like unto this burthen of hers--a grief and a desolation beyond speech.