The winter passed heavily away: no change for the better relieved our fears for Mr. Shenstone, and, before spring, poor Mrs. Arnold died, and left me alone with the burden of care and dread. All that time is like a sad, slow dream; I cannot tell the days apart as I look back upon them--the one fear that grew daily colored all events alike. It was like no other approaching death that I had ever seen. I knew he was longing for his release; but what would be release to him would be my sentence of banishment--my separation from the only friend I had, the severing of the only tie I knew. Still it seemed vague and far off, and the warm spring days came slowly on, and crept into June, before either he or I knew how very few he had yet to live. The doctor had at last to tell me what every one else knew--that Mr. Shenstone could not live a week. I do not think that he himself, though knowing well that the time was at hand, had been aware how very near it was. I knew it was not too near for his desires; but one earthly care vexed the holy calm of his death-bed. "I must see Arthur before I die. Write to him again, and beg him to come quickly. He could not have realized what I meant him to understand when you wrote last, or he would have been here before." I wrote again urgently, and told him in the plainest words what the necessity for his coming was, and how anxiously Mr. Shenstone desired an interview before he died; that it was the one ungratified wish that disturbed his last moments; the letter was hurriedly dispatched, and yet day after day passed and no answer came. It was cruel to see the momentary eagerness with which the dying man's eye lighted up at each new sound without, and to hear the faint sigh with which he sank back at the fresh disappointment. I had my own interpretation of this silence; but I dared not tell him. Through the winter his letters had been irregular; it was now some weeks since any had come; I did not feel a doubt but that he had gone abroad again, and, in the hurry of departure, had omitted to write. Something that Mrs. Fielding (the pretty Janet Emerson, married and living at New Orleans, but on a visit to her old home, who had found me out and come to see me a month or so before) had said, confirmed my suspicions. "I heard from Paris a week or so ago," she said, "that your cousin, Miss Churchill, and Mr. Rutledge are really to be married. Upon my word, you must excuse me; but it is a shame. I grudge him to her. Ah! _méchante_, if you had made the proper use of that evening in the library that I gave you, she would not have had him."