He hardly knew what he wished. Humphrey's horror at his impending fate had made such an impression on Sir Everard that he almost shrank from hearing the child would recover to such a life as that. And yet when the doctors told him his boy must die, a revulsion of feeling swept over him, and his rebellious heart cried, "Anything but that!" "Would it be soon?" he tried to ask. "It could not be far off," they said. "Would the child suffer?" "They hoped not--they believed not;" and they wrung his hand and departed. He followed them to the hall door, and waited with them till their carriage came up. It was a still summer's morning when they came out upon the steps, as if all nature were silently and breathlessly awaiting the verdict. But as the doctors got into their carriage, a light breeze sprang up, causing the trees to sway and rustle with a mournful sound, as if they knew the sentence, and were conveying it to the fields around. Sir Everard stood watching them as they drove away--those great court physicians, who, with all their fame and all their learning could do nothing for his boy--nothing! He listened to the sighing of the wind, and watched the trees bowing mournfully before it; and he wondered vaguely what was the language of the winds and breezes, and in what words nature was learning his boy's fate. It seemed to him that the breezes pursued the retreating doctors, and flung clouds of dust around them, as if taunting them with their inability to help; and then, returning once more to the oaks and beeches, resumed their melancholy wail. Dreamily there recurred to his mind that ancient fable the children loved to hear: that story of the olden time which tells how the wind wafted through the trees to the passers-by, the secret which had been whispered into the bosom of the earth: "List! Mother Earth; while no man hears, King Midas has got asses' ears." And, as he cast one more look at the carriage in the distance, before re-entering the house, the messages of the breezes seemed to come into his head in the form of the baby rhymes he had so often heard the children sing. CHAPTER XVI. Before returning to the sick-room, Sir Everard sat down to write some letters. He tried to think of some one he could send for, to help him in his trouble. His mother was too infirm to leave home, his sister perfectly useless, and they were the only relations he had. His brother-in-law was the person who would have been the greatest comfort to him, but he had just been appointed to a ship, and Sir Everard knew him to be up to his neck in preparations, perpetually veering between London and Portsmouth. As, however, he must pass Wareham Station on his journeys to and fro, Sir Everard wrote to beg him if possible, to stop for one night on his way.