"Do I?" said Lady Hastings in a hesitating tone. But she did not want the doctor to be sent for immediately, and repeated her order to call her husband and her daughter. Emily was with her in an instant, but Sir Philip Hastings was some where absent in the grounds, and nearly half an hour elapsed before he was found. When he entered he gazed in his wife's face with some surprise--more surprise indeed than alarm; for he knew that she was nervous and hypondriacal, and as the maid had said, she did not look as if she were dying at all. There was no sharpening of the features--no falling in of the temples--none of that pale ashy color, or rather that leaden grayness, which precedes dissolution. He sat down, however, by her bed-side, gazing at her with an inquiring look, while Emily stood on the other side of the bed, and the maid at the end; and after speaking a few kind but somewhat rambling words, he was sending for some restoratives, saying "I think, my dear, you alarm yourself without cause." "I do not indeed, Philip," replied Lady Hastings. "I am sure I shall die, and that before very long--but do not send for any thing. I would rather not take it. It will do me more good a great deal to speak what I have upon my mind--what is weighing me down--what is killing me." "I am sorry to hear there is any thing," said Sir Philip, whose thoughts, intensely busy with other things, were not yet fully recalled to the scene before him. "Oh, Philip, how can you say so?" said Lady Hastings, "when you know there is. You need not go," she continued, speaking to the maid, who was drawing back as if to quit the room, "I wish to speak to my husband and my daughter before some one who will remember what I say." Sir Philip however quietly rose, opened the door, and motioned to the girl to quit the room, for such public exhibitions were quite contrary to his notions of domestic economy. "Now, my dear," he said, "what is it you wish to tell me? If there be any thing that you wish done, I will do it if it is in my power." "It is in your power, Philip," replied Lady Hastings; "you know and Emily knows quite well that her engagement to Mr. Marlow was against my consent, and I must say the greatest shock I ever received in my life. I have never been well since, and every day I see more and more reason to object. It is in the power of either of you, or both, to relieve my mind in this respect--to break off this unhappy engagement, and at least to let me die in peace, with the thought that my daughter has not cast herself away. It is in your power, Philip, to--" "Stay a moment," said her husband, "it is not in my power." "Why, are you not her father?" asked Lady Hastings, interrupting him. "Are you not her lawful guardian? Have you not the disposal of her hand?" "It is not in my power," repeated Sir Philip coldly, "to break my plighted word, to violate my honor, or to live under a load of shame and dishonor."