It was a tacit confession of weakness that she did not like to hear; and she saw that even in the short space of time that had elapsed since he wrote before his strength had visibly declined. He was scarcely able to guide the pen. "That will do," when he had traced a few lines. "Sara, should you have occasion to send this, enclose it in a note from yourself, explaining my state when I penned it; that I was almost past writing. Will you remember?" "Yes, papa," she answered, her heart beating painfully at the words. "Fold it for me." Honourable in all her thoughts and actions, Sara folded the note with the writing turned from her. It is just possible some children might have been sufficiently actuated by curiosity to glance at least at the name at the commencement of the note. Not so Sara Davenal. She placed it in an envelope and fastened it down. "I think I can direct it, Sara. Just the name." She gave him the pen, and he traced the name in uneven, doubtful letters. Sara noted it with surprise, and perhaps her pulses quickened. "O. Oswald Cray, Esquire." "Put it in my desk with Edward's, my dear. If you have occasion to send the one, you will the other." As she unlocked the desk again her tears were raining down fast. In all that her father was saying and doing there seemed to be a foreshadowing in his own mind of his approaching death. She quitted the room for a few minutes that her emotion might spend itself, and in the interval Miss Davenal entered. The soft rustling of Miss Bettina's sweeping silks aroused the doctor, who had fallen into a dose. She went up and took his hand. "Richard, how are you tonight?" "I hardly know. Middling." "Sara is fancying you are not so well." "Is she?" "But she always was given to fancies, you know. Is it right that you should sit up so long the first time of leaving your bed?" "Yes, I like the change. I was tired of bed. Sit down, Bettina. There are one or two things I want to say to you." "Are you finding yourself worse?" "Bettina, I have not been better." "The doctors have thought you so," she said, after a pause. "Ay, but I know more of my own state than they can tell me. When the suffering and its signs passed, they leaped to the conclusion that the disease had left me. In a measure, so it has, but they should have remembered in how many of such cases the apparent improvement is all deceit, the forerunner of the end." Bettina Davenal fully understood the words and what they implied. But she was not a demonstrative woman, and the rubbing together of her white and somewhat bony hands was the sole sign of the inward aching heart. "And I am thankful for the improvement," added the doctor. "It is not all who are permitted this freedom from pain in their dying hours." "O Richard! is there _no_ hope?"