And Sydney had some difficulty to smooth him down again, and to gain his consent to the acceptance of the second invitation when in course of time it made its appearance. It was accepted, but the visit did not take place. Before the date fixed for it arrived, Mr Laurence had another attack of illness, from which he only recovered sufficiently to be moved to a milder place, where for a few weeks, Sydney, though at no small personal inconvenience, accompanied him. Something was said by her in one of her letters to Eugenia, suggestive of her joining them and taking her share in the nursing and cheering of their father; but the proposal met with no response. Loyal and true-hearted as she was, Sydney felt chilled and disappointed, and said no more. But all through the winter, in reality passed by Eugenia in loneliness, and suffering, and yearning for sympathy, which only a mistaken desire to spare her sister sorrow prevented her expressing--all these months Sydney pictured her as happy and prosperous, so free from cares herself as to be in danger of forgetting their existence in the lives of others. For the more steadily hopeless Eugenia grew, the more cheerfully she wrote. And forced cheerfulness often bears a strong resemblance to heartlessness. "I am glad and thankful she is happy," thought Sydney, "and she certainly must be so, for it is not in her to conceal it if she were not; but I did not think prosperity would have changed Eugenia." Nor would she, for any conceivable consideration, have owned to any one, least of all perhaps to her husband, that she _did_ think so. Mr Laurence had fortunately no misgivings on the subject of his elder daughter. She was happy, she wrote regularly and affectionately--she had twice fixed a time for him to visit her, but circumstances had come in the way. It was all quite right. He loved her as fondly as ever, with perhaps a shade _more_ fondness than the child "who was ever with him," whose new ties had in no wise been allowed to interfere with her daughterly devotion; it never occurred to him that Eugenia's affection could be dimmed. "I should like to see her," he said sometimes--"I should like to see her very much--in her own home too. But by the spring we shall be able to arrange for it; by the spring, no doubt, I shall be more like myself again, and able to manage a little going about. We must go together, Sydney, my dear, as Eugenia wished." And Sydney said, "Yes, by the spring they must arrange it." But a shadowy misgiving, that had visited her not unfrequently of late--a little, painful, choking feeling in her throat, a sudden moisture in her eyes, made themselves felt, when she looked at her father's thin, worn face, and heard him talk about "the spring;" and she wondered, as so many loving watchers wonder, "if the doctors had told her the whole truth."