I saw a quick look of alarm in Aline's face. If that speech had been uttered before she had consented to Esther's going, her consent would have been harder to extract. But now it was too late to withdraw, and so poor Aline, with a melancholy visage, said good-bye to the sister whom we should see constantly, but who had nevertheless gone out of our house and our home, for ever in all probability. Such partings, even in the happiest circumstances, are sad things. That night, as I was going to bed, Aline came in and kissed me with unusual fervour. "Ah, little Hilda," she said, "we are beginning to dwindle!" and I knew she had it in her mind of who would be the next to go. "But it is good for Esther," I said, though my own heart was full of tears. "Yes, Lady O'Brien has already provided for her. Sir Peter's money returns to his family, but she has a comfortable sum to live on in her own right. So that two of the children are now safe out of the clutches of poverty--Freda and Esther. We who are left ought not to repine." If there was anything else at her heart she did not speak of it to me that night. CHAPTER XV. PIERCE GOES ON A JOURNEY. That winter was a very quiet and a very sad one. As the days passed we felt the wings of death brooding closer over the house. Little by little Pierce had given up the ways of one who was to live, had given up his bath-chair which was Lady O'Brien's present, and the sofa in Aline's room, and the coming downstairs. We knew now that he would come down no more till he was carried down, and we dreaded the spring that would bring further weakness to our beloved invalid, and the summer that would take him from us. He liked to get up about noon and lie on a sofa drawn near the fire and have us to talk to him, and as the days turned towards the spring he lay by the window where he could see the cloudiness coming on the bare boughs and Brandon turning bronze and pink in the fresh cold air. What his room became in those days I never could tell. Whatever had befallen our Pierce out in the world, and he carried the secret with him to the grave, he had saved his soul triumphantly out of it. To see him there dying in the flush of his youth, so resigned, so gentle, so merry even, clutched at our hearts. He prayed incessantly when he was alone or quiet, and in those latter days he came to have visibly the light of God's countenance upon his face. His room was like the cell of a saint to which we went for help, and comfort, and refreshment. Once when Aline and I came out together she suddenly caught at me and began to sob silently against my shoulder, yet in the midst of her anguish she whispered to me: "Oh, Hilda, I wouldn't keep him if I could! I can see that he is ripe for heaven. And yet, and yet, it breaks my heart to see him so glad to go."