"I will stay with you to the end," said Mr. Chantrey; "it is fit for me. You are teaching me a lesson of patience, Ann. All this day I have been thinking if it would be possible for me to give up my wife, and send her away from me, to end her days apart from mine. I have been in despair; in the very deeps. But now; why! even if I knew she would die thus, I cannot forsake her." "Ay! we must have patience," she answered. "I always hoped to win him back again, but it was too strong for him and me. God knows how he's been tempted on all hands; even those that call themselves religious, and go to church regular as can be. He used to cry to me sometimes, and promise to turn over a new leaf; and then somebody perhaps that he looked up to would treat him at the Upton Arms. He might have been a good man, if he'd been left alone." "Let us pray together for him and ourselves," said Mr. Chantrey, kneeling down once again by the little couch, as he had knelt the night of his return home. Ann still held her brother's head upon her arm, and her bowed face nearly rested upon it. But all words failed David Chantrey. "Father!" he cried, "Father!" There was nothing more that he could say. It was the single, despairing call of a soul that was full of trouble; that was "laid in the lowest pit, in darkness, in the deeps." But the bewildered brain of the dying man caught the cry, and he muttered it over to himself; "Father! father! where is he?" "It's God, our Father who art in heaven," said Ann Holland, uttering the words very slowly and distinctly in his ear; "try to think of Him, and pray to Him. He'll hear you, even now." "Father!" he muttered again, "why! he'd be ashamed of his boy." "It's God," she said, keeping down her sobs, "you've no other father. Think of Him: God, who loves you." "He'd be ashamed of me," repeated the dying man. For a minute or two he kept on whispering to himself words they could not hear, except the one word "shame." Then all was still. The miserable end had come; and neither love nor patience could avail him anything on this side the grave. He had gone as a drunkard into the presence of his Judge. CHAPTER XII. A COLONIAL CURACY