“‘I am sorry, Aggie, I am so sorry, and I wish I had left you in your home as innocent as I found you, poor little Aggie, so white and cold; don’t look at me with those mournful eyes; don’t touch me with those death-like hands; don’t you know you are dead, _dead_, and dead folks lie still? Don’t touch me, I say;’ and cries of fear would echo through the hall as the terror-stricken man fancied himself embraced and held fast by the arms which for so long had been at rest beneath the sod in southern France. “‘It’s the French girl after him now,’ the keeper would say, as he heard the cries and pleadings for some one ‘to lie still and take their cold hands off.’ ‘It’s the French girl after him now, _death hug_, you know. He’ll be quieter when it’s t’other one;’ the ‘t’other one’ referring to Anna, who was often present to the disordered mind of the man, but who never excited him like Agatha. “He was not afraid of Anna, but would hold long conversations with her, trying sometimes to convince her of her insanity, and again telling her that he loved her and always had, notwithstanding what he had heard her say of him in New York. It was in the spring following the summer when Anna arrived at Millfield that this softer, quieter mood came upon him, and with it a debility, and loss of strength and appetite, and gradual wasting away, which told that his days were numbered. Years of dissipation had undermined his naturally strong constitution, and he had no surplus vitality on which to draw, so that the decay, once commenced, was very rapid, and just a year from the day Anna came back to Millfield, he was dead. “Madame Verwest was with him when he died for though he never asked for her or for any one, the mother love was too strong to keep her from him, and she went to him unbidden when she heard how sick he was. Whether her presence was any gratification to him or not, she never knew, for he expressed nothing, either by word or look. Once, when she spoke to him of Anna and his boy, there came a faint flush upon his face, and he repeated the names: “‘Anna—Arthur.’ “Again, when she said to him: “‘Ernest, you have much money, and land in your possession. If you die, where do you wish it to go?’ “For a moment he regarded her intently, and then replied: “‘Anna, Arthur—mother.’