Agnes bade the maid bring her some shawls, and lie down herself. She went softly into the sick room and put a wrap round Mary’s shoulders, who raised her pale face, just visible through the dark in its whiteness, to kiss her in token of thanks. Agnes permitted her hungry heart an anxious look at the patient and satisfied herself, to the relief of various awful doubts that had been growing on her that he breathed softly and regularly, though almost inaudibly. She endeavored in vain to rouse the sleeping woman behind, and then she herself retired into the ante-room. Was it true? Could it be possible? As she sat there, realizing the extraordinary way in which Mary and she had been allowed to come in and take possession, when she perceived that no one came near them, that Letitia did not return, did not even send a servant, but gave up the patient and the charge of him without a word, without the slightest notice of their possible wants, or care for them, a sense of the strangeness of it all grew upon her. Could Mary’s tale be true? Oh, God, could it be true? The woman sleeping so deeply, not to be roused--the house fallen into complete silence as if everyone had gone to bed. Mary and she, as it seemed, the only two waking in all the place. Could it be true? Could it be true? An hour or two later the scene had changed, the sick room was faintly illuminated through the closed curtains with the light of the morning. And Agnes, looking in, through the half open doorway, met Mary’s look, her face like the clear, pale morning, a sort of ecstasy in her wakeful eyes. She did not seem to have moved since Agnes threw the shawl round her, nor had she closed those widely-opened eyes. When she had given her sister that look they returned to the bed where Mar’s young wasted countenance was now dimly visible. There was almost a chill in that blue dawning of the new day; a something clear and keen above illusion, the light of reality, yet the light of a vision. As Agnes looked, everything returned to its immovable stillness again. The pale boy sleeping, the pale mother watching, the nurse behind come into sight with her head thrown back, a potent witness in her insensibility. Was it true? Could it be true? CHAPTER XLVIII.