The cry woke the nurse, brought the young doctor, drowsy and confused, from the next room, and Lucy flying, all her fair locks about her shoulders, down-stairs. The Fords followed more slowly--the very maids were roused. But the release which the old man had got was not of the kind anticipated by his companions. He was liberated from the disease, which nobody had hoped; he had recovered his speech, though his utterance was greatly changed and impeded; and, though one side remained powerless, he retained the use of the other. He was even so much himself as to chuckle feebly, but quietly, when the doctor returned a few hours later, and pronounced him to be almost miraculously better. “I’ll trouble you, doctor, to witness it,” the old man said, babbling over the words, and looking with his enlarged but dimmed eyes at the papers by his bedside. “I’ve got something to add; but I’ll not put off and cheat myself, not put off and cheat myself again.” This they thought was what he said. And thus the will got signed at last. He lingered for some time after, continually endeavoring to resume his old work, and now and then becoming sufficiently articulate to give full evidence of the perfect possession of his faculties. But within a week a third seizure carried off the old man without power of protest or remedy. His unexpressed intentions died with him, but the words, “I’ve something to add,” were the last he said. CHAPTER XVI. THE READING OF THE WILL. Little Jock Trevor had never been a favorite with his father; there had been between them nothing of the caressing intercourse which generally exists between a very old father and a young child. He was not the pet or plaything of the old man, who had remorselessly sentenced him to as complete a separation as was possible from his sister. But, nevertheless, Jock had grown up literally at his father’s feet, and the world became suddenly very vacant and strange to him when the familiar figure was withdrawn. The little fellow did not understand life without this central point of stability and power in it; he had been used to the old man’s presence, to the half-comprehended talks which went on over his head, and to the background of that mysterious aged life filled with so many things beyond Jock’s understanding, which yet afforded depth and fullness to his strange perceptions of the mysterious world. He and his books had lain in the foreground in a varying atmosphere of visions, but behind had always been that pervading consciousness of something more important, a dimly apprehended world of fact. So it happened that, of all the household at the Terrace, it was little Jock who felt his father’s death the most deeply; his nerves had suffered from contact with that still more mysterious dying which he could not understand. He could not get out of his childish mind the impression made upon him by the sudden opening, in the dreadful silence of his father’s eyes. He who