They got the sufferer conveyed to his room and laid on his bed a few minutes after, and within a very short time the only medical aid which the neighborhood afforded was by the bed-side. But medical aid could do little for the minister--he was old, and had long been growing feeble, and nobody wondered to hear that he had suffered “a stroke,” and that there was very, very little hope of his recovery. The old people in Kirkbride clustered together, speaking of it with that strange, calm curiosity of age, which always seems rather to congratulate itself that some one else is the present sufferer, yet is never without the consciousness that itself may be the next. A profound sympathy, reverence, and compassion was among all the villagers--passive towards Dr. Logan, active to Katie, the guardian and mother of the little household of orphans who soon were to have no other guardian. They said to each other, “God help her!” in her youth and loneliness--what was she to do? As for the Mistress, she was not one of those benevolent neighbors who share in the vigils of every sick room, and have a natural faculty for nursing. To her own concentrated individual temper, the presence of strangers in any household calamity was so distasteful, that she could scarcely imagine it acceptable to others; and she never offered services which she would not have accepted. But there was neither offer nor acceptance now. The Mistress sent word at once to Marget, took off her bonnet, and without a word to any one, took her place in the afflicted house. Even now she was but little in the sick chamber. “If he kens her, he’ll like best to see Katie--and if he doesna ken her, it’ll aye be a comfort to herself,” said the Mistress. “I’ll take the charge of every thing else--- but his ain bairn’s place is there.” “I only fear,” said the doctor, “that the poor thing will wear herself out.” “She’s young, and she’s a good bairn,” said the Mistress, “and she’ll have but one father, if she lives ever so long a life. I’m no feared. No, doctor, dinna hinder Katie; if she wears herself out, poor bairn, she’ll have plenty of sad time to rest in. Na, I dinna grudge her watching; she doesna feel it now, and it’ll be a comfort to her a’ her life.” It was, perhaps, a new doctrine to the country doctor; but he acknowledged the truth of it, and the Mistress, wise in this, left Katie to that mournful, silent, sick room, where the patient lay motionless and passive in the torpor of paralysis, perhaps conscious, it was hard to know--but unable to communicate a word of all that might be in his heart. The children below, hushed and terror-stricken, had never been under such strict rule, yet never had known so many indulgences all their lives before; and the Mistress took _her_ night’s rest upon the sofa, wrapped in a shawl and morning gown, ready to start in an instant, should she be called; but she did not disturb the vigil of the daughter by her father’s bed-side.