"Ah! A very fatal complaint, my dear, especially among children. I have always had a great horror of it. In my younger days it used to be called sore throat, but I suppose it killed just as many people then as it does now that it has got a fine long Latin name. I suppose your poor brother suffered a great deal--didn't he, love?" No answer, except a stifled sob, a rush from the room, and the sound of flying feet upon the hall's stone floor. There are some things past human endurance; and to hear Jack's parting agonies--agonies whose memory she herself dare as yet hardly contemplate in her heart's low depths--lightly discussed by a gossiping old woman, is one of those things. CHAPTER XXXI. "Get me some fresh candles--long ones; longer than these--as long as you possibly can," Esther says that same evening, on going to bed, to the housemaid whom she finds putting coals on her fire. "I think, 'm, that you will find these will last for to-night," the woman answers, looking at the very respectable dimensions of the unlit candles on Esther's queer old-fashioned toilet-table. "No--no, they won't!" she answers, nervously; "it is better to be on the safe side." "Would you like a night-light, miss?" "Oh no, no! they make the corners of the room blacker than ever, and they cast such odd shadows. I'm _so_ afraid of the dark," she ends, shuddering. "I'm afraid you don't sleep well, 'm?" "Not very. By-the-by" (with a sudden inspiration), "have you got anything that you could give me to make me sleep--any opiate of any kind?" "I've got a little laudanum, ma'am, that Mrs. Franklin give me last week when I had a bad face." "Fetch it me," she cries, eagerly; "that is, if you don't want it yourself. It is very foolish of me," she says, looking rather ashamed, "but I cannot sleep for fright." The servant goes, and presently returns with a small dark blue bottle. "About how much ought one to take, I wonder?" Esther says, holding it up between herself and the firelight. "If you have never been used to take it before, I should think two or three drops would be _hample_, 'm; I hope, 'm" (with a little anxiety in her florid plebeian face), "as you'll be careful not to take a _h_overdose, or you might chance never to wake up again: I knew a young person as took it by mistake for 'black dose'--it was the fault of the chemist's young man--and in an hour she was a corpse; they said as she had took enough to kill ten men." "It is no wonder that she was a corpse, then," Miss Craven answers, with a slight smile. "I should not think" (scrutinising the little bottle inquisitively), "that there was enough here to kill one woman, let alone ten men. Yes, I'll be careful; thanks, very much. Good night!" (with her pretty courteous smile).