Sir Peregrine Alsager did not die, as Laurence had thought, and dreaded that he was to die, with the silence between them unbroken, the estrangement unremoved. Nothing could undo the past, indeed; but the present was given to the father and son; and its preciousness was valued duly by them both. In a few days after Laurence's arrival the paralysis loosened its grasp of his father's faculties; and though he still lay in his bed shrunk, shrivelled, and helpless, he could see, and hear, and speak. Sometimes his words were a little confused, and a slight but distressing lapse of memory caused him to pause and try painfully first to recall the word he wanted, and next to accomplish its utterance; but gradually this difficulty wore away, and the old man spoke freely, though little. He was greatly changed by his illness--was most pathetically patient; and his face, a little distorted by the shock, and never more to wear the healthy hue of his vigorous age, assumed an expression of tranquil waiting. The supremacy of his will was gone with the practical abolition of his authority. He let it slip unnoticed. He cared little for anything now but the presence of his son and the progress of the mornings and the evenings which were making the week-days of his life, and wearing towards the dawn of the eternal Sabbath. He loved to have Helen with him, and would regard her with unwonted interest and tenderness,--keenest when she and Laurence met beside his couch, and talked together, as they came gradually to do, very often at first for his sake, and afterwards, as he hoped, as he never doubted, for their own. Yes, the keen anxiety, the foresight, the intensifying of former mental attributes which characterize some kinds of physical decay in persons of a certain intellectual and moral constitution and calibre, showed themselves strongly in Sir Peregrine Alsager, and centred themselves in his son. He had asked nothing, and had heard little of his wandering and purposeless life; but that little had made the old man--held back now, on the brink of the eternal verity, by no scruples of coldness, of pride, of pique, or of scrupulosity--very anxious that his son should marry, and settle down to live at Knockholt Park at least a fair proportion of the year. With that considerate, but perhaps, after all, beautiful, simplicity which restores to age the faith of youth, and builds her shrines for all the long-shattered idols, Sir Peregrine reasoned of his own life and his own experience, and applied his deductions to his son's far different case. He was, however, too wise to put his wishes into words, or even to make them evident without words, to their objects. But there were two persons in the small group who tenanted Knockholt Park who knew that the dearest wish of Sir Peregrine's heart, that desire which overpassed the present and projected itself into the inscrutable future, when its fruition might perchance never be known to him, was that Laurence