The light in her eyes seemed to give a leap of joy and triumph, then closed under the flickering eyelids, he thought for ever, and he cried out involuntarily, and made a step nearer to the bed. When her eyes were closed, she looked like one who had been dead a day, nothing but a faint, convulsive heave of the shoulders showing that there was life in her still. The mother busied herself about the half-unconscious creature, putting the cordial to her lips, supporting the pillow against her own breast. ‘You will have an easy bargain,’ she said, as she went on with these cares; ‘but anyhow, we’ll bless you for what you say. Matilda, give me the drops the doctor left for her when she felt faint. She’s very low, now, poor dear! Mr. Wentworth’s behaving like a gentleman, as you always said he would. He has promised to marry her to-morrow morning, if she lives. She’ll not live, but she’s satisfied, poor dear!’ Matilda had come so softly into the room that she startled him as if she had been a ghost. ‘I knew as he would do it when he saw how bad she was; but, Lord, what do it matter to the poor thing now?’ This was his own opinion. In a few minutes more there was a bustle downstairs, which Matilda pronounced to be the doctor coming, and Wentworth went down to wait until he had paid his visit. The little parlour below had one candle burning in it, for the benefit of those who went and came. The young man was left there for a few minutes alone. To describe the condition in which he was is impossible. His heart was beating with a dull noise against his breast. All that had been so bright to him a little while before had become as black as night. He could not think; only contemplate what was before him dumbly, with horror and disgust and fear. He had given a pledge, but it was a pledge that never would call for fulfilment--no, no, it never could be fulfilled--it would be as a nightmare, a dreadful dream, from which he would awake by-and-by and find the sun shining and all well. After a while he heard the doctor’s heavy foot come clamping down the wooden staircase. He was angry with the man for having so little delicacy, for making so much noise when his patient was dying. Presently he came in to give his bulletin to the gentleman, whom he perceived at once to be somehow very deeply concerned. ‘Last the night? No, I don’t think she’ll last the night: but you never can tell exactly with such nervous subjects. She might put on a spurt and come round again for a little while.’ ‘Then,’ said Wentworth, with a sense that he was acquiring information clandestinely, ‘there is no hope of any permanent recovery?’ The doctor laughed him to scorn. If he had not been a parish doctor, accustomed to very poor patients and their ways, he would not have allowed himself to laugh in such circumstances.