With noiseless fingers--Hannah was usually a bustling servant, and the strange quiet of her movements, together with a peculiar and unwonted stillness that reigned through the house, filled Honor’s mind with a great, but undefined, uneasiness--with noiseless fingers then the old servant opened the door of the vehicle, and in a low, boding whisper, her face close to Honor’s ear, said pityingly: “Keep a good heart, dear; he ain’t worse, thank God; and the doctors, they _do_ say--” But Honor waited to hear no more. The force of _reality_, the call for immediate action, suddenly loosened her tongue and rendered her limbs pliant. In a moment she was by Hannah’s side, and saying in tones, unconsciously imitative of those which had been so full of startling meaning: “O, Hannah! what is it? O, Heaven! he is not ill! Tell me he is not ill!” and she strove to steady herself by clinging convulsively to the old servant’s arm. “Hush, my dear, hush! You mustn’t take on so. I thought you’d a’ known that master was lying in the fever, or you wouldn’t, maybe, be here. But come in, there’s a dear. This is the fifth day, and Doctor Kempshall says there’ll be a chrisus, I think he calls it, soon, but whether for life or death, the God that rules us only knows.” Hannah, who was a pious woman, and one who held to the belief that no misfortunes happen to us by the power that is lightly called _chance_, spoke the last words with almost devotional earnestness, adding thereby to the wild alarm that Honor was beginning to entertain. “In danger!” she cried, “and I never knew it! O, John, dear John!” and she was hurrying to the stairs, when another step treading still more softly, and a voice more whisperingly low than even Hannah’s, checked her progress. “You musn’t go, _my dear_,” said Mrs. Beacham, for she it was who, looking like the ghost of her former self, pressed Honor’s white cheek to hers. “You must not see John now. The fever may, the doctors say, be infectious, and if it please God to spare his life, why--” with a very sad smile, but one that was meant to be reassuring--“we may want you yet.” This reception, and the unlooked-for kindness of the broken-down old woman, was too much for Honor. Falling on her knees, and with a feeble cry of, “Forgive me! O forgive me!” she buried her face in her mother-in-law’s gown, and sobbed as if her heart would break. CHAPTER XXIV. THE USES OF ADVERSITY.