‘Perhaps she will not help him much; but she will be there,’ said the doctor. He was glad for himself that a soft-voiced, soft-eyed, pitying creature should be there. There was help in the mere fact, whatever she might say or do. Cara had been living a strange life through these melancholy days. She had not known, poor child, the full significance of that scene by her mother’s bedside, of which she had been a witness. She did not fully understand even now: but glimmers of horrible intelligence had come to her during that interview in the library, and the things she had heard afterwards from the servants had enlightened her still more. She heard the whispers that circulated among them, terrified whispers, said half under their breath. That she had done it herself--that she knew, poor dear, what she was doing--that if anything had been known, there would have been an inquest, and things would have come out. This was what Cara heard breathing about in half whispers, and which filled her with strange panic, lest her secret should escape her. She knew the secret, and she only. Nobody had questioned her, but the child’s impulse to tell had bound her very soul for days after. She had resisted it, though she had felt guilty and miserable to know something which no one else knew; but she had kept her secret. ‘Don’t let us brand her with the name of suicide.’ These words seemed to ring in her ears night and day. She repeated them over and over to herself. ‘Don’t let us brand her with the name of suicide.’ ‘No, no,’ poor Cara said to herself, trembling; ‘no, no:’ though this premature and horrible secret weighed down her heart like a visible burden. Oh, if she could but have told it to nurse, or to Aunt Cherry! but she must not, not even to papa. When her aunt arrived, it was mingled torture and relief to the poor child. She clung round her with sobbing, longing so to tell; but even to cling and to sob was consolatory, and Aunt Cherry wanted no explanation of that unusual depth of childish distress. ‘Cara was not like other children,’ she said to herself. She had feelings which were deeper and more tender. She was ‘sensitive,’ she was ‘nervous.’ She was more loving than the ordinary children, who cry one moment and forget the next. And kind Cherry, though her own grief was of the milder, secondary kind, as was natural, had always tears of sympathy to give for the grief of others. She took the little girl almost entirely into her own care, and would talk to her for hours together; about being ‘good,’ about subduing all her little irritabilities, in order to please mamma, who was in heaven, and would be grieved in her happiness to think that her child was not ‘good.’ Cara was greatly awed and subdued by this talk. It hushed her, yet set her wondering; and those conversations were sometimes very strange ones, which went on between the two in their melancholy and silent hours. ‘Does everybody go to heaven who dies?’ said Cara, with awe-stricken looks.