She held open the door as she said so, and the visitors entered. The scanty hangings of his bed hid them from the miserable man who lay writhing and struggling there, and the brothers started in utter amazement as they looked upon the wasted and dying occupant of that poor room; the brilliant, the fashionable, the rich, the talented Forsyth--where were all these vain distinctions now?--lay before them, labouring in the last great conflict; poor, deserted, forlorn, and helpless, without a friend, without a hope, with scarce sufficient wealth to buy the cold civility of the terrified nurse who tended him with mercenary carelessness; pressing fast into the wide gloom of eternity, without one feeble ray of life or hope to guide him on that fearful passage, or assuage the burning misery of his soul ere it set out. Halbert Melville, deceived by that poor sufferer of old, bent down his face on his clasped hands, speechless, as the well-known name trembled on his companion’s tongue,-- “Forsyth!” “Who calls me?” said the dying man, raising himself fearfully on his skeleton arm, and gazing with his fiery sunken eyes through the small apartment. “Who spoke to me? Hence!” he exclaimed, wildly sitting up erect and strong in delirious fury. “Hence, ye vile spirits! Do I not come to your place of misery? Why will ye torment me before my time?” His trembling attendant tried to calm him: “A minister,” she said, “had come to see him.” He said: “_He_ allow a minister to come and speak with him?” A wild laugh was the response. “To speak with _me_, me that am already in torment! Well, let him come,” he said, sinking back with a half-idiotic smile, “let him come”---- and he muttered the conclusion of the sentence to himself. “Will you come forward, sir?” said the nurse, respectfully addressing Halbert. “He is composed now.” Trembling with agitation, Halbert drew nearer the bedside, but when those burning eyes, wandering hither and thither about the room, rested on him, a maniac scream rang through the narrow walls, and the gaunt form sat erect again for a moment, with its long arms lifted above its head, and then fell back in a faint, and Halbert Melville hung over his ancient deceiver as anxiously as though he had been, or deserved in all respects to be, his best beloved; and when the miserable man awoke to consciousness again, the first object his eye fell upon, was Halbert kneeling by his bedside, chafing in his own the cold damp hand of Forsyth, with kindest pity pictured on his face. Had Halbert disdained him, had he shunned or reproached him, poor Forsyth, in the delirious strength of his disease, would have given him back scorn for scorn, reproach for reproach. But, lo! the face of this man, whom he had wounded so bitterly, was beaming on him now in compassion’s gentlest guise; and the fierce despairing spirit melted like a child’s, and the dying sinner wept.