Having once enlisted Mrs. Jerningham’s friendship for Lucy Alford, Mr. Desmond felt that the young lady’s fortunes had passed out of his care. Already Emily had shown herself so kind and generous that it would have been base ingratitude to doubt her charity in every new emergency. He therefore held himself aloof from Lucy and her father, and only from Mrs. Jerningham did he hear how it fared with the girl in whose fate he had taken so benevolent an interest. But while he made no overt attempt to comfort or assist her in the hour of trial and trouble, he thought of her, and pitied her, with a constancy that was at once perplexing and unpleasing to his own mind. “Poor little thing!” he said to himself, when he thought of the motherless girl watching the fading hours of her sole protector. And he wondered to perceive how much tenderness it was possible to infuse into those three common words. “Poor little thing! Tristram Alford cannot last many weeks--that is certain. And then--and then? She will be left quite alone in the world. And she must suppress all sign of her natural grief, and enact one of _those ladies_--ever so slightly expurgated--in _Côtelettes sautées chez Véfour_. What a dreary present! what a hopeless future!” And at this point Mr. Desmond would dig his pen savagely into the paper, destroy the quill of an unoffending goose, and fling it from him in a sudden rage. “What is it to me?” he asked himself. “There are hundreds of friendless girls in London for whom the future is as hopeless. Am I going to turn Quixote, and ride a tilt against the windmills of modern civilization?” One morning in February the editor of the _Areopagus_ found an envelope edged with deepest black upon his breakfast-table. It contained a brief despairing scrawl from Lucy, smeared and blotted with many tears. Death had claimed his victim. The third seizure had come, and all was over. “I cannot tell you how kind Mrs. Jerningham has been,” wrote the mourner; “all is arranged for the funeral. It is to take place on Friday. My poor dear will rest in a pleasant spot. It is very hard to bear this parting; but I think it would have seemed harder to me if he had died in London.” And then followed little pious sentences, in which faith struggled with despair. “He was always good and kind,” she wrote; “I cannot recall one cross word from his dear lips. He did not go to church so regularly as religious people think right; but he was very good. He read the Bible sometimes, and cried over it; and wherever we lodged, the little children loved him. It was not in his nature to be harsh or unkind. May God teach me to be as good and gentle as he was, and grant that we may meet some day in a happier world!”