“Oh, nurse, the change!” said Agnes, clasping her hands, with the full sense of the words flashing on her mind. “Yes,” said the nurse. “I can’t say, and no one can say, what change it will be--but I believe the fever will go. And then--it all depends upon his strength,” she added, “and I take the cheerful view.” “You think there is still hope?” said Agnes, taking the woman’s hand in hers. “Oh, plenty of hope!” said the optimist. But when the anxious visitor was allowed to come within the door, and from that corner saw Mar lying in the doze in which he spent most of his time, her heart sank within her. Nothing could look more feeble, more like death, as if he were gone already, than the waxen face of the boy, with his dark eyelashes against his cheek. She turned away and put her hands to her eyes, thinking he was already gone. What did it matter what any one said? Hope died with a pang unspeakable in the anxious woman’s breast. She came away again without listening to the further words of comfort which the nurse poured into her ears. Comfort--what comfort was there possible when he lay there, gone, wasted to a shadow, shrunken to nothing, with those wide circles round his eyes, and the blue veins like streaks of color? Agnes said to herself she had seen too many to deceive herself. She knew, whatever any one might say. As she came down again to the hall, Letitia’s carriage arrived at the door. Though Agnes was so hopeless and so entirely convinced that nothing could now avail, the sound of the carriage wheels on the gravel made her shrink and glow with indignation, as if the noise might harm him. The first words she said to Mrs. Parke were of reproach. “Couldn’t you drive round another way, not to disturb him?” she said. “Ah, you have come to see our poor Mar. No, dear boy, we don’t disturb him. Nothing has disturbed him for a long, long time, alas!” said Letitia. The mournful motion of her head, her measured tones of fictitious grief, gave Agnes an impulse to strike her, as a brutal man might have done, upon the lying mouth. “Oh, Aunt Agnes,” cried Letty, “stay, stay! Don’t go away.” There was no possibility of doubting the sincerity of Letty’s wet eyes and tear-stained face. “I am afraid I cannot ask you to do that,” said Letitia. “If it had been Mary---- But there are too many people already in the house. And you could do Mar no good, Agnes; in all likelihood he will never recognize anybody--he will just sleep away. And the agitation is more than I can bear. And at such a moment it is best there should be nobody in the house but the family alone.” “I am his mother’s sister,” said Agnes, painfully. “But such a mother! who has never spoken to him, never acknowledged him, would have turned him out of his rights if she could. No, he must be left now to those who have cared for him all his life.”