She withdrew to a little distance and cast herself down in a chair, and covered her face, but it was not enough not to see, for she could still hear the spasm that shook his old frame. He must be left alone--you only disturb him---- What terrible words are those to say! Was it, she wondered in her confused brain, because of the delusion in his that she had abandoned him? How could he think she had abandoned him? His head must have gone wrong, to think of her short visit to the Marsdens as if it had been a desertion. And this little boy who had been a comfort to him----! Mary could not understand it. The heart which had been so light to come home, so sure that as soon as she was there to take care of him Frogmore would get well, began to sink: you only disturb him! Oh, was it possible that this was the sole issue of her nursing, she who had always been considered the best of nurses! Mary began to cry silently, under cover of the hands in which she had hidden her face, and despair stole into her heart. The sound of the coughing filled the room, persistently, going on and on. Now and then came a break and she thought it was over, but it only began again. And the doctor stood there, only looking on, doing nothing, and Rogers, who somehow stepped out of the shadow behind in anxious attendance too, was doing nothing. So many of them, with the command of everything that money could buy, and yet they could do nothing. The poorest tramp on the wayside could not have coughed more incessantly or with less help from anything that could be done for him than Lord Frogmore.