He put up his hand to stop her, and then his countenance changed and melted, and some moisture came into his bright eyes. He gave a strange little laugh. “I was a better boy in those days than I am now.” “You never made yourself out to be good,” said Marjory, with tears; “but you were always good to me. Oh, God bless you, dear Tom! if we were only to say, ‘Our Father’--after being up all night--don’t you think it would do us good?” “Say what you like, May.” The words were common-place, but not the tone; and Marjory, with his hand clasped tighter within hers, was kneeling down by the bed, when the door opened, and their father came in. Mr. Heriot had grown ten years older in that half hour. He came in with a miserable smile, put on at the door as a woman might have put on a veil. “Well, Tom, my man, and how are we getting on now?” he said, with an attempt at hearty jocularity, most pitifully unlike his natural tone. Tom looked from his father’s ghostly pretence at ease to his sister’s face, as she knelt by the bed, with his hand pressed between hers, now and then softly kissing it, and smiling at him with an effort which became more and more painful. A change came over his own countenance. With a sudden scared look, he thrust his other hand into his father’s, and grasped him tight, like a frightened child. “Don’t let me go!” he cried, with one momentary unspeakable pang. Then swiftly as the mind moves at moments in which a whole life-time seems concentrated, he recovered his mental balance. How few fail at that grand crisis! He recovered himself with one of those strange rallyings of mental courage which make all sorts of men die bravely with fortitude and calm. The whole revolution of feeling--enlightenment, despair, self-command--passed so quickly that only spectators equally absorbed and concentrated could have followed them. “Well!” he said, finally, “if it is to be so, we must bear it, father. We must bear it as well as we can.” Meanwhile Mr. Charles, not knowing what to do with himself, had examined everything in the sitting-room downstairs, not because there was anything to interest him, but because, while he suffered as much as the others, he had not, like the others, a primary claim to be with the chief sufferer of all. “Best leave them alone, best leave them alone,” he had said to himself a dozen times over. “They’re better alone with him--better alone.”