This time Sir William did not get better as he had done before. His third fainting-fit proved the beginning of an illness at which the village doctor looked very grave. It was still but a very short time since he had come down from London, relieved at the end of the session, to enjoy his well-earned leisure, with everything prosperous around him, nothing but the little vexation of Paul’s vagaries to give him a prick now and then, a reminder that he too was subject to the ills of mortality. What a happy house it had been to which the tired statesman had come home! When he had taken his seat by the side of Alice in the little pony-carriage there had been nothing but assured peace and comfort in his mind. Paul:--yes--Paul has been a vexation; but no more. Now all that brightness was overcast; the happy children in their holiday freedom were hushed in their own corner of the house no longer allowed to roam through it wherever they pleased. Lady Markham, with all pretty gowns, her lace and ornaments put away, lived in her husband’s sick-room, or came down stairs now and then with an anxious smile, “like someone coming to call,” the little girls said. Alice had become not Alice, but a sort of emissary between the outside world and that little hidden world up stairs in which the life of the house seemed concentrated. As for Sir William, he lay between life and death. First one, then another great London physician had come down to see him--but all that they could suggest had done him little or no good. All over the country messengers came every day for news of him; the head of the government, and even the Queen herself, and all the leading members of the party sent telegrams of inquiry; and there were already flutters of expectation in the town he represented as to the chances of the Liberal interest, “should anything happen.” Even into Lady Markham’s mind, as she sat in the silent room, often darkened and always quiet, trying hard to keep herself from thinking, there would come thoughts, dreary previsions of change, floating like clouds across her mental firmament, against her will, in spite of all her precautions--visions of darkness and blackness and solitude which she tried in vain to shut out. Her husband lying so still under the high canopies of the bed, from which all curtains and everything that could obstruct the free circulation of air had been drawn aside, capable of no independent action, but still the centre of every thought and plan--was it possible to imagine him absent altogether, swept away out of the very life in which he had been the chief actor! These thoughts did not come by any will of hers, but drifted gloomily across her mind as she sat silent, sometimes trying to read, mechanically going over page after page, but knowing nothing of the meaning of the words that were under her eyes. To realise the death of the sufferer whom one is nursing is, save when death is too close to