"She'll never get well, my dear," said Professor Valeyon, very quietly. "Her mind and body both have had too great a shock--far too great. More has happened than we know of yet, I suspect. But we shall hear, we shall hear. Yes, sleep is good for her: it'll make her comfortable. Her nerves will be the quieter." "O papa! papa! is our little Sophie going to die?" faltered Cornelia; and then she broke down completely. She had not fully grasped the idea until that moment; but the very tone in which her father spoke had the declaration of death in it. It was not his usual deep, gruff, forcible voice, shutting off abruptly at the end of his sentences, and beginning them as sharply. It had lost body and color, was thin, subdued, and monotonous. Professor Valeyon had changed from a lusty winter into a broken, infirm, and marrowless thaw. He stood and watched her weep for a long while, bending his eyes upon her from beneath their heavy, impending brows. Heavy and impending they were still, but the vitality--the sort of warm-hearted fierceness--of his look was gone--gone! A young and bitter grief, like Cornelia's, coming at a time of life when the feelings are so tender and their manifestation of pain so poignant--is terrible enough to see, God knows! but the dry-eyed anguish of the old, of those who no longer possess the latent, indefinite, all-powerful encouragement of the future to support them--who can breathe only the lifeless, cheerless air of the past--grief with them does not convulse: it saps, and chills, and crumbles away, without noise or any kind of demonstration. The sight does not terrify or harrow us, but it makes us sick at heart and tinges our thoughts with a gloomy stain, which rather sinks out of sight than is worn away. "Will you stay and watch with her, my dear?" said the old man, at last. "She'll sleep some hours, I think. I'll take a little sleep myself. Call me when she wakes." So Cornelia was left alone to watch her sleeping and dying sister. All the morning she sat by the bed, almost as motionless as Sophie herself. Her mind was like a surf-wave that breaks upon the shore, slips back, regathers itself, and undulates on, to break again. Begin where she would, she always ended on that bed, with its well-known face, set around with soft dark hair, always in the same position upon the pillow, which yielded beneath it in always the same creases and curves. By-and-by, wherever she turned, still she saw that face, with the pillow rising around it; and when she shut her eyes, there it was, growing, in the blackness, clearer the more she tried to avert her mind.