“Oh, I do not overlook your anxiety, Mrs. Parke! No doubt it is very great--but the other ladies must be told. Tell them----” The doctor paused when he saw her hungry look. It flashed into her face that now she would hear the exact truth how much there was to fear and how much to hope. She looked at him as he paused, clasping her hands tight. “Yes?” she said, breathless. The doctor, it was evident, had thought better of what he was going to say. “Tell them,” he said, “that the circumstances are serious: that there is an absence of certain of the worse symptoms--but again that the matter is grave. It all depends on how his strength keeps up. And that in the present position of affairs I think they should be here.” “You think they should be here,” Letitia repeated breathlessly. It seemed to her the most satisfactory utterance she had yet heard. “Yes, it would be an ease to your own mind to have his nearest relatives on the spot. They would share your anxiety at least--and it is not as if there was any want of room. They should have been here at once--to prevent reflections--in case anything should happen.” A lightning gleam seemed to come out of Letitia’s eyes--like that electrical flash which the doctor had thought scorched him when Mar’s illness began. “Then you think----” she said with a heaving of her breast. “I think no more than what I have said: but to have Lady Frogmore here and Miss Hill would in any case be best.” Letitia repeated “Lady Frogmore” unconsciously under her breath. It was not of Mary she was thinking. It was of the next bearer of that title, the woman towards whom the coronet was floating ghost-like in a sort of trail of cloud. “I can’t believe,” said the doctor sharply, “that Lady Frogmore will be so indifferent as is said to the condition of her son.” Letitia went to her writing table when he was gone with a strange buoyancy. She had not written any letters for some time, but there was a sort of exultation in her now as if the end of her suspense was near. John came in when she had seated herself and begun her letter. He had missed the doctor and was anxious to hear what he had said. There was something in his wife’s aspect which startled him. “The boy is better?” he exclaimed. He gave her in the impulse of the moment a credit which she did not deserve. “Is he?” cried Letitia, turning round upon her chair with all the color going out of her face. She added tremblingly, shrinking from her husband’s eye, “Do you mean that there is a change?” “I thought so,” he said gravely, “from the relieved look in your face.” They contemplated each other for a moment in silence, John with pain and distress, she shrinking a little from his eye. “I don’t know what you mean,” she said; “though I might be relieved to think that the poor child will not suffer much longer. I am to write to his mother, the doctor says.” “To write to his mother! Then he has given up all hope?”