Ten minutes, twenty, slipped by, and Anne began to fear her husband had forgotten his promise; she wondered at his delay, and looked round to see if he had forgotten anything. His sermon, blotting book, small ink-bottle, all had gone. She turned to the chest of drawers and was ransacking them hurriedly, when she heard him come back. "Why, Tom," she said, without turning round, "Here are all your handkerchiefs, every one of them! Don't talk of my carelessness after this," and she laughingly held them up as a trophy. But her husband's face was white, so very white, that Anne's heart turned sick, and almost stopped beating. With a faint cry she crept up to him, and with a timid, frightened look, gazed into his face. "What is it?" she whispered, "are you ill? Oh! tell me! Tell me!" "No, no. It's worse, Anne, worse," he murmured hoarsely. "Oh! for God's sake tell me, Tom! or I shall die." "It is Vavasour," he said, as he took her in his arms and held her to his heart. "Forgive me for having frightened you so, Anne. But Vavasour has been shot." "Thank God you are well?" said Anne, bursting into tears, "But, oh, Amy! my poor darling Amy!" CHAPTER XV. THE LAST OF LITTLE BERTIE. "She put him on a snow-white shroud, A chaplet on his head; And gathered only primroses To scatter o'er the dead. She laid him in his little grave-- 'Twas hard to lay him there: When spring was putting forth its flowers, And everything was fair. And down within the silent grave, He laid his weary head; And soon the early violets Grew o'er his grassy bed. The mother went her household ways, Again she knelt in prayer; And only asked of Heaven its aid Her heavy lot to bear." L. E. L. On leaving Frances Strickland, Amy went to poor Bertie's room to lay the fair white cross in his coffin, and was bending down over her lost darling in an agony of tears which old Hannah vainly attempted to check, when the sudden, hasty gallop of a horse away from the stables struck her ear. It was the groom going for Dr. Bernard. Amy's mind, already unnerved and unstrung, was easily alarmed. "Alas! Hannah," said she, drawing near the darkened window "has any accident happened that some-one rides so furiously?" "My dear Miss Amy," replied Hannah, forgetting in her tender pity Amy's new tie, and thinking of her only as the wee child she had so lovingly nursed on her knee, "you must not be frightening yourself this way. What should have happened? God knows you've had enough to worry you. There, don't tremble that way, but let go the blind, and come away from the window." But Hannah's persuasions and entreaties were alike useless. Amy, with fluttering anxious heart still looked out through the deepening shadows of the day, now fast drawing into evening.