“Strange what could have troubled him so! Possibly it might have been that he repented of that strange will.” “Not altogether that, I think. It was some persons he wished to see,—an old man and woman. Madame spoke of them impatiently in that way, but promised to send for them.” “And did she?” “No, there was no effort made to send for any one. Another night, when he was growing worse and worse, I heard him pleading with her; some person was to be sent for whom he wished to speak with before he died—must speak with if she was on the face of the earth. Madame became furiously angry then. She no longer attempted to pacify him with promises, but filled the sick-room with her angry revilings, while he lay trembling under her violence till the bed shook beneath him. At last, urged on by rage, such as I had never seen even in her before, she darted toward the bed, and would have seized him by the shoulders, but I flung my arms around her, and prevented the sacrilege by taking her almost by force from the room. When I came back to the bed, our father was stricken with paralysis. “Oh, George! it would have broken your heart, could you have seen his beseeching eyes follow me around the room after that. I knew that he would have spoken to me then, had the power been left him. Once, when Madame was out for a moment, he made a desperate effort to speak, but his voice came forth in a broken moan; and I saw two great tears roll from the pleading eyes, wrung from some want which he had no power to express.” “Could he not write?” inquired George, in a troubled voice. “No; he made an effort, and with his poor shaking hand, strove to scrawl a name; but I could not read it; Madame came in while I was trying to make it out. With an angry glance at him, she took it from my hand and tore it up. “My poor father’s eyes turned upon her with an expression that would have melted a heart of iron. I have heard of wounded stags, weeping while under the torment of a pack of hounds, George. The great tears which came again to that old man’s eyes, when his wife—I will not call her mother with this feeling upon me—tore up the name he had tried to write, seemed as if shed under like torture.” “All this fills me with self-reproach. I ought to have been by my poor father’s death-bed. I being older than you, might have comprehended his wishes,” said George De Marke, sadly. “I cannot tell, George; it might have been a wish to redeem the injustice of his will; sometimes I think it was only his lawyer’s name that he wrote; for Madame looked like death when she read it. I am sure she did read it, illegible as it was, for she muttered something that made the sick man struggle in his bed. Nothing but the fear of losing her grasp on the property could have disturbed her so!”