The drowsiness that used to frighten Margaret with its threatened mastery she has no longer any need to keep at bay. On the contrary, the preternatural wakefulness which had been with her all last night is with her still. With her, too, is the thundering silence, beating in her ear like a loud drum. All her last night's enemies are here again--all but one, the worst. She has no longer to contend with those flashes of dreadful incongruous joy. They at least are gone--extinct, dead! He that had called them forth is massed in her despair with her other dead. They are all gone irrevocably. The only difference is that God took the others, and she herself has thrown him away. But they are all equally gone--gone! If it were not so, if she had any one left, would she be kneeling here, in this overpowering loneliness, watching Prue go, and asking God over and over again, in the same stupid agonised words, to let her go easily? Yes, it has come to this. We begin by asking such great things for our beloved--honour, and wisdom, and long life, and riches; and we end in this, 'Give them a short agony, an easy passing!' Is it a sign that God has heard her prayer, that as the hours go by Prue begins to talk out loud, with little laughs between? to talk--not of her cough, and her physic, and her short breath--but of gay and lovely things. She is talking to one who is not here, of fair sights that are not before her dying eyes. Peggy holds her breath to listen. She is sitting in the garden with Freddy. She is riding with him through the woods. From what she says, it must be springtime. What a sheet of harebells! Never any May that she remembers have they been so many before! And the birds! how loudly they are singing! She would like to know the note of each, but she is so stupid, he must teach her! A great dry sob breaks from the listener's breast. 'Oh, Prue, Prue!' she moans; 'take me with you! Let me, too, see the flowers and hear the birds!' But Prue does not heed. She babbles happily on. By and by her wanderings die down into a sort of semi-stupor, that is neither sleep nor waking. The silence that her voice had broken is not again wholly restored. It is exchanged for those indefinite noises of the night which, to timid souls, seem to share the dominion of terror with its stillness. There are definite noises too. A mouse gnaws behind the wainscot; the wind has risen, not into a loud and roaring storm, but into a plaintive piping and muttering and whistling. A loose rose-branch that in summer sends its petals flying in through Prue's casement to her feet, is now tapping pertinaciously on the pane. It seems as if it would not take 'No' for answer, as if it were crying to her with summoning fingers, 'Come, come! it is time!'