“For the following day the family remained in that intensity of expectation that precluded all thought. The servants prepared the usual meal, but it remained untasted. The family pressed each other to partake of it; but as the importunity was not enforced by the inviter setting any example of the lesson he tried to teach, the meal remained untasted. About noon a grave person, in the habit of a notary, was announced, and summoned Walberg to be present at the opening of Guzman’s will. As Walberg prepared to obey the summons, one of his children officiously offered him his hat, another his cloke, both of which he had forgot in the trepidation of his anxiety; and these instances of reminiscence and attention in his children, contrasted with his own abstraction, completely overcame him, and he sunk down on a seat to recover himself. “You had better not go, my love,” said his wife mildly. “I believe I shall--I _must_ take your advice,” said Walberg, relapsing on the seat from which he had half risen. The notary, with a formal bow, was retiring. “I _will_ go!” said Walberg, swearing a German oath, whose guttural sound made the notary start,--“I _will_ go!” and as he spoke he fell on the floor, exhausted by fatigue and want of refreshment, and emotion indescribable but to a father. The notary retired, and a few hours more were exhausted in torturing conjecture, expressed on the mother’s part only by clasped hands and smothered sighs,--on the father’s by profound silence, averted countenance, and hands that seemed to feel for those of his children, and then shrink from the touch,--and on the children’s by rapidly varying auguries of hope and of disappointment. The aged pair sat motionless among their family;--they knew not what was going on, but they knew if it was good they must partake of it,--and in the perception or expectation of the approach of evil, their faculties had latterly become very obtuse.