“We will do our best for her, Ellen and I, my dear fellow. But you’ll soon be better. Horrid things, these quinsies; but they pass off.” Poor Joe half-smiled at this confident opinion, but he merely wrung his brother’s hand, and only twice more took up the pencil--once to write the name of the clergyman he wished to see, and lastly to put down the initials of all his children: “Love to you all. Let God and your mother be first with you.--J. B.” The daylight of the second morning had come in before that deadly suffocation had finished its work, and the strong man’s struggles were ended. When Colonel Brownlow tried to raise his sister-in-law, he found her fainting, and, with Dr. Lucas’s help, carried her to another room, where she lay, utterly exhausted, in a kind of faint stupor, apparently unconscious of anything but violent headache, which made her moan from time to time, if anything stirred her. Dr. Lucas thought this the effect of exhaustion, for she had not slept, and hardly taken any food since her breakfast at Kyve three days ago; and finding poor old nurse too entirely broken down to be of any use, he put his own kind wife in charge of her, and was unwilling to admit anyone else--even Mrs. Robert Brownlow, who arrived in the course of the day. She was a tall, fine-looking person, with an oval face--soft, pleasant brown skin, mild brown eyes, and much tenderness of heart and manner, but not very well known to Caroline; for her periodical visits had been wholly devoted to shopping and sight-seeing. She was exceedingly shocked at the tidings that met her, and gathered Janet into her arms with many tears over the poor orphan girl! It was an effusiveness that overwhelmed Janet, who had a miserable, hard, dried-up feeling of wretchedness, and injury too; for the more other people cried, the less she could cry, and she heard them saying to one another that she was unfeeling. Still Aunt Ellen’s presence was a sort of relief, for it made the house less empty and dreary, and she took upon her the cares that were greatly needed in the bereaved household, where old nurse had lost her head, and could do nothing, and the most effective maid was away with the children. So Janet wandered about after her aunt, with an adverse feeling at having her home meddled with, but answering questions and giving opinions, called or uncalled for. Her longing was for her brothers, and it was a great blow to find that her uncle had written to both Allen and Mr. Acton that they had better not come home at present. She thought it cruel and unjust both towards them and herself; and in her sickening sense of solitude and injury she had a vague expectation that they were all going to be left wholly orphans, like the children of fiction, dependent on their uncle and aunt, who would be unjust, and prefer their own children; and she had a prevision of the battles she was to fight, and the defensive influence she was to exert.