the being of a woman who was a mother, and knew what it was in a way to love those who belonged to her! She could not keep down the wild buoyancy of her hope and exhilaration. This boy, who never ought to have existed, who had been from his birth the obstacle to all her hopes, this supplanter, this undesired, unnecessary child--he would die! and for Letitia and all who belonged to her the future of her brightest hopes would be secured at last. But with this there sprang up in her mind a dreadful impatience. It did not seem to her that she could go on day after day enduring all the vicissitudes of this illness until the crisis came--if indeed his strength held out till the crisis came. Sometimes the patient, if he were weak, collapsed early, and the disease did not run its full course; sometimes it was rapid, violent, _foudroyant_. A hundred confused calculations ran through her mind. Mar had not life enough for that. Probably the fever would be slow with his low vitality, not blazing but sapping the life away--and he would have to keep up all through--expressing anxiety, watching day and night for the change, looking on with outward calm while the doctors would go through all that daily pantomime with the thermometer, which she would scarcely be able to endure. Yes, this is how it would be--weeks of it, perhaps; horrible, lingering on when it might just as well be over at once without all this slow torture. Letitia remembered after what seemed a long time that she had an afternoon party on the lawn, and that all her guests would be wondering at her absence. She would have to put on a grave face, and speak of her anxiety and his delicacy, and go through all the fantastic performances which decorum demanded. But he would die--of that certainty at least there could be no doubt now. CHAPTER XXXVIII. The family were all very much startled by the news, which Letitia communicated only when the arrival of a nurse in the costume which is not to be mistaken startled the household. “What does that woman want?” said John, who was prejudiced like so many gentlemen against costume, and did not like the professional air. “She is the nurse whom Dr. Barker has sent for Mar.” “For Mar,” cried all the party with varying tones of expression. Letitia looked round upon her husband and her children, and she felt that there was not one of them who had any sympathy with her--who thought at all of the consequences or of what would happen--if---- She was provoked beyond expression by the look of alarm and imbecile anxiety on all their faces. “What is the matter?” John said. “Is there anything more than usual? I thought he had a cold. What is wrong with the boy?” “Only an attack of typhoid,” Mrs. Parke said with angry gravity. They never did sympathize with her or enter into any of her thoughts--though the advantage she anticipated was to them chiefly, she said to herself angrily, and not to her.