The silence within, only broken by whispering voices, frightened him, and his heart began to beat loudly. If only the child could have looked into the room and seen his little brother lying in bed half asleep, and Virginie putting a linseed poultice on his chest, or whispering to Jane to bring her his cooling-draught, his fears would have vanished. But it is ever so with sudden illness. Those who are kept in the dark always have the worst of it; for mystery and suspense are, like anticipation, always worse than reality. Imagination runs riot, and brings great suffering to the outsiders. How much are children to be pitied on these occasions! Everyone's thoughts are necessarily with the invalid, and no one has time to bestow a word on the poor little trembling things standing outside the sick-room. They feel they are useless, and considered in the way; and do not dare make inquiries of the maids who run in and out of the room--with important faces, who probably could not stop to answer even if they did; and so are left to magnify every sound into some terrible significance, which probably has no foundation but in their own disordered fancies. There is terror in whispering voices, agony in the sharp ringing of a bell, mystery even in the calling for spoons and glasses, and their jingling as they are handed in. All this, and more, was experienced by little Humphrey Duncombe. I say _more_, because his fears were not those of ordinary children. The dread I have been describing is for the most part a nameless dread; the children know not why they fear, nor what; it is all vague and undefined, because they have no experience of sorrow. But remember that this child was no stranger to sickness and death; that into his little life they had already entered; that the grim visitor had swept through the walls of his home, and left it very empty. What had happened once, might happen again. So he gave it all up at once, "Miles was dying! perhaps already dead!" A child of Humphrey's disposition suffers intensely when face to face with sorrow. Granted that the power of being easily distracted is a mitigation, it does not alter the feeling _for the time_. Life, past and future, is grafted into the misery of the present, and existence itself is a blank. He was so tender-hearted, too, poor little fellow! so remorseful for his errors, so sensitive to an unkind word. Yet, as we have seen, with all this, he was so heedless, thoughtless, and volatile, that no one could give him credit for any depth of feeling; and even his father (though he would not have had it otherwise, though he rejoiced that he should have the capability of turning into enjoyment, both for himself and Miles every event of their lonely child-life) had marvelled at him, and had more than once said to himself, "The boy has no heart!" No heart! why, as we see him there in the passage, his poor little heart is filled to bursting.