“Then don’t!” said old Trevor, with a fiercer gleam in his eyes; “that’s my advice to you, Richard Ford. Don’t! I want to hear nothing of your one that has a claim. Who has any claim! not a soul in the world! Lucy’s fortune is her own--she’s obliged to nobody for it. It comes to her, not from me, that I should take upon me to pick and choose. She does not get a penny from me; all I have I’ve given to the other, and a very good nest-egg for his position in life. But Lucy’s fortune is none of my making; Lucy is Lucilla’s daughter.” “Susan’s cousin!” said Ford, instinctively. He regretted it the next moment, but he could not withhold this protest. To think that all the money should be Lucilla’s, and none of it come to Susan, though she was Lucilla’s cousin! It is hard, it must be allowed, to see fortunes come so near, yet have no share in them. In the family, yet not yours, not the smallest bit yours, save by grace and favor of a stranger, a man who is your cousin’s husband, indeed, but has no claim otherwise to belong to the family. The Fords were not at all ungrateful to old Trevor; but still there were moments when this struck them in spite of themselves. CHAPTER XIV. A FALSE ALARM. The prophets of evil were not deceived; when a kind of general impression arises in respect to an invalid that a crisis is approaching, it almost always is justified by the event. During that very night there was a sudden alarm; Mr. Trevor’s bell rang loudly, awakening all the house. Lucy flew from her room, hastily gathering her dressing-gown round her, with her light hair hanging about her shoulders, and Mrs. Ford appeared in a night-cap, which was an indecorum she recollected long afterward. The maids naturally, being less interested, were harder to rouse, and it was Mr. Ford himself who issued forth in the penetrating chill of the early morning, still quite dark and silent, not a soul astir, and buttoning himself into his warmest overcoat, went out in the cold to seek a doctor, who, for his part, was just as unwilling to be roused out of his slumbers in the middle of the night. Jock, roused by the sounds, sat up in his little bed, with wide-awake eyes, hearing the bell still jar and tinkle, and sounds of people running up-and down-stairs, which half frightened, half reassured him. To hear other people moving about is always a comfort to a child, and so was the reflection of the lamp at the gateway of the Terrace, which shone into his room and kept it light. Jock sat up and gazed with big eyes, and wondered, but was too much awed and alarmed by the nocturnal disturbance to move; and, indeed, as it turned out after, there was not much need for any one to be disturbed. Old Trevor’s explanation was that he had woke up with a loud singing in his ears and a sense of giddiness, and he could not articulate at first when, they rushed to his bedside, so that everybody believed it to be a “stroke.” But when the doctor came he