But Harry would not listen to the entreaties, and in the end he heard no voice save Fan’s. He stood there till her tale of martyrdom was burnt in and branded on his conscience. Under the operation his face did not grow sharp as Fan’s sharpened, neither did his fair hair betray patches of grey, as her dark hair betrayed when it was pushed aside that the death-sweat might be wiped from her temples. Yet his whole aspect underwent such a change as it was hardly possible he could entirely lose, so as to become the same that he had been before. He grew perceptibly older-looking in those days which could be so easily counted, with the sudden stamp of ripening to withering, which rapid, mortal illness sometimes impresses even on an infant’s face. He had never before willingly encountered what was painful either to his senses or his sensibility. He had always selected the paths which were easiest and most agreeable to himself, without too much regard to their going down hill. They had brought him to where the battle raged hottest in the Valley of the Shadow of Death; and though it was not himself, but another, who was slain—the fumes of the smoke, the clatter of the strife, the deep wounds, the flowing life-blood, the gloom of that valley of shadows, were not likely to depart utterly from his consciousness, and leave him in the light-hearted, light-headed carelessness, the hard, untempered blaze of sunshine, of his former experience. Fan had forgotten her baby in that last whirl of the tempest which swept her away, but she remembered it in the end. In the pouring out of her tribulation without restraint, she had constantly called on Horace and Oliver to help Harry, who stood nailed to the ground there by her pillow. Then, when her voice was sinking into an indistinguishable murmur, and her hands letting go every earthly hold, she felt gropingly for her child, and struggled to utter another sentence audibly. She did not speak for the child with her passing breath as so many mothers have spoken for their children. Fan’s care for Harry had swallowed up her care for their child. She spoke to the unheeding, unconscious infant who for many a long year would be a helpless human being, needing tender fostering and watchful protection, and instead of recommending the child to the father, in the bewilderment of poor Fan’s unapproachable fidelity to Harry, she recommended the father to the child. ‘Baby, take care of Harry,’ she managed to say, and with a few more fluttering breaths, died. The words of Fan’s final, fond, foolish injunction were still ringing in Harry’s ears when he staggered out of the room. CHAPTER XXVIII. OLIVER’S RETURN.