“I am afraid,” Mrs. Asquith said, “I am selfish. I think too much of my own. I can’t enter into the troubles of the new family. It’s only of the old I can think when I am here.” “But oh! it’s no new family, ma’am; it’s the same family, it’s your own, own family,” cried Bessie Brown. “If you’re married ever so, you can’t give your natural relations up.” “My natural relations!” Mary cried. But the conversation by this time had caught the watchful ear of the housekeeper, who left Darrell and came back to see what was going on here. “Brown,” she said, “what are you doing in this room? who told you to come and talk to a lady who is paying a visit in the house? I hope, Mrs. Asquith, you’ll excuse her. There is no rudeness meant,” the housekeeper said. “My natural relations,” Mary repeated. “I don’t know what you mean. The house has passed into other hands. I don’t suppose there are any of my relations here.” “Brown, you had better go to your work. I’ll answer the lady’s questions. We did not know till the other day that there was any relationship.” “But,” said Mary bewildered, “it is Mrs. Rotherham----” “Mrs. Prescott-Rotherham. My lady was an heiress. She married Mr. Prescott----” The discovery was too bewildering and strange to convey itself distinctly to Mary’s troubled brain. She said only something which she felt to be entirely irrelevant. “Who, then, is the invalid gentleman?” she cried. [Illustration] CHAPTER XXIII. THE SICK-ROOM. Mrs. Asquith took her place in Hetty’s room to keep watch there, with indescribable anxiety and alarm. She had been warned that every night since that mysterious occurrence Hetty had seemed to go over again in her dreams the midnight visit which had jarred her being. It had been the effort of her nurses to soothe and silence her, to get her, if possible, to forget; but every night the dreadful recollection had come back. Mary sat down to watch, feeling that this moment of return upon the cause of all the trouble might be the moment of recovery, if she but knew how to use it aright. But that was the question, of far more importance for the moment than those other wonders and anxieties which had arisen in her mind, and which she had not been able to satisfy. How was she to act that this moment might be the critical one, that she might be able to penetrate within the mist that enveloped Hetty? She tried to think, tried to form for herself a plan of action, but with trembling and doubt. The child’s life, the child’s reason, might depend upon her own presence of mind, her power to touch the right chord, her wisdom. Mary had never taken credit to herself for wisdom. She had never had to face the intricate problems of human consciousness; how to minister to a mind diseased had never been among her many duties. Out of all the simple calls of her practical life, out of her nursery, where everything was so innocent, how was she to reach at once to the height