Shading the light with her hand, Sybil stole a glance at her mother's face, and an alteration in its expression filled her with such terror, that a cry almost escaped her. The mouth was more distorted, and the eyes--for Constance was quite awake--were regarding her with a strange, keen, sad and weird expression. At that moment, however, Winny, hearing her young mistress stir, appeared at the door of the room. "Oh Winny!" whispered Sybil in an agony of alarm, "there is a change come over mamma; go--go at once for the doctor, ere it is perhaps too--too late! No, no; you are old and frail, and the moor is wet," she suddenly added; "get me my hat and cloak--I, myself, shall fly for him." "No, no, darling; stay by her side--she may not be long spared to you, and I shall go. Past three in the morning, and dark as midnight. I'll take a lantern and be off." "Oh, thank you, Winny, thank you!" said the girl, kissing the old woman's shrivelled cheek, and with hasty and trembling fingers assisting to muffle her in a cloak, and to light a lantern; and then seeing her issue forth upon her errand with all the speed her love and charity inspired, and her old limbs could exert; and with clasped hands, and a prayer upon her lips, Sybil at the door for a little space watched the lantern (Winny's figure was soon lost amid the gloom), as its fitful light fell in succession upon the grey, upright blocks of the stone avenue that marked the desolate moorland road, till at last it diminished to a spark, like an _ignis-fatuus_, and then she stole back once more to her mother's side. The left arm of the latter was outside the coverlet now, and her hand, so snowy in its whiteness, rested on the edge of the bed. With her eyes full of tears, and her heart full of earnest prayer, Sybil knelt reverently down to kiss it, taking the hand between her own caressingly. How _heavy_ that little hand felt now! Cold, too--its touch startled her. She threw back the curtain; her mother lay motionless with jaw somewhat relaxed, her eyes still, and staring upward. Death was too surely there, but Sybil had never looked upon it, and only felt wildly startled and terrified. She tried to raise the head, but felt powerless. "Oh mamma--dear mamma, do not leave me! Come back to me, mamma--come back to me!" she exclaimed, in a voice the tones of which seemed discordant and shrill to her own ear. "Is this sleep or death? oh, no! no, not death--NOT death!" But it was so, and how terribly pale, serene and still, how calm and peacefully she lay, with something of a smile gathering on her lips, like one "who had ended the business of life before death, and who, when the hour cometh, hath nothing to do but to die." Bewildered and awe-struck, with a wild beating in her heart and in her brain, Sybil drew back; then she stood still and listened.