After this the evening seemed to speed away in an incoherent troubled blank, as it does when illness is present absorbing every interest. It seemed to be ten o’clock, then midnight, before any one was aware that the day was ended; and yet every minute was so long. Mary sat a little apart, with a strange pained sensation of reluctance to subject herself again to that reproach--_You disturb him_--which rankled in her mind, and vaguely, dimly, saw many things pass which she did not understand. The little boy, for instance, was brought in and flung himself upon Frogmore’s bedside, the old lord turning his worn face to him, stroking the little pale cheeks with his trembling withered hands, and kissing the child again and again. “Oh father,” the child said, “father!” and Frogmore murmured, “my little boy, my little man!” in his feeble voice, again and again. Mary sat bolt upright and looked on, with I cannot tell what wonder and wretchedness in her eyes. She was put away from her husband’s side, and this little thing had his tenderest words. Where had he come home from, that little boy? and by what strange chance had he thus become the sweetest and dearest thing to Frogmore? Sometime in the middle of that long feverish blank which was the night Dr. Marsden came to her and insisted she should go to bed. “He is a little quieter now, and there is nothing to be done. Nothing. Nothing that you or anyone can do. You promised to do whatever I told you when I said I would bring you home, Lady Frogmore.” Mary made no answer to this voice which came to her in the long silence, and which she was not very sure was anything but a voice in a dream. She looked up into the face of her doctor with a dumb obstinacy which he did not attempt to overcome. For her only answer she crept back to the bedside and took her place again there, and watched and watched till a cold blue stole through the closed curtains and every crevice, and the candles and lamp seemed to grow sick and pale, and it was day again. Frogmore’s face looked grey like the daylight when that pitiless, all pervading light came in; but his eyes turned to her with wistful affection, and he put out his old, withered, aged hand. And then the light faded away.