Re-addressing Audley's letter was fated to be the last action the right hand of Constance was to perform in this world. For the two days subsequent to the episode just related she remained in bed, exhausted apparently, sadder and lower in spirit than usual; and on the morning of the third, Sybil, when drawing back the curtains to see if she were asleep or awake, to receive her daily kiss and join in prayer, was inexpressibly shocked and terrified to perceive a peculiar fixity in one eye, and that a corner of her still beautiful mouth was strangely drawn down on one side. Paralysis had supervened, and poor Constance had totally lost the use of one half of her body! Summoned in hot haste, the village doctor came, with his stereotyped professional expression of sympathy. He felt her pulse, repeater in hand, and ominously shook his head. "Oh, sir, do you think there is danger?" asked Sybil, in intense agitation. "Hush, child--come this way," said he, and led her from the room. "God help me, sir--you have something terrible to tell me?" "I have, indeed; but nerve yourself, for she has none to depend upon now but you." "None, indeed, save One who is in Heaven." Her disease, he said, was embalism; it came from the region of the heart, and had been gradually but rapidly forming in her system for some time past; anxiety and sorrow had doubtless induced it. and some recent excitement--that night affair, of which the doctor knew not--had brought it to a head. A second shock, he added, must inevitably prove fatal! With dilated eyes and clasped hands, the unhappy girl listened to this sentence of death, for such it sounded in her overstrained ear and to her aching heart, as the doctor spoke it in an impressive and never-to-be-forgotten whisper, in a room adjoining that in which the sufferer lay. He then paused, and gazed with much of genuine sympathy into the pale face of the startled listener; perhaps he was mentally speculating upon the probable future of this lovely girl, with whose sad family history he was quite familiar now. And what was embalism, she asked, in a low and intensely agitated voice. A species of weed, or little fungus, that grew in the upper region of the heart, from whence it passed, by minute fibres, fine as a gossamer thread, through the blood-vessels, till, by choking the passage of one of them, there ensued the dire effect they had seen. And was it curable? No; yet the patient might linger for months; and, he added, that Sybil must control her grief, nor let the sufferer see by it that danger was apprehended.