It was impossible for her to be always in the sick-room, and Alec liked best to be left alone. It was the room that had always been his own. Here he had read and worked to prepare himself for College. At that old-fashioned window he had often sat, dreaming dreams which would never come true. How fair the world had seemed to him but a few short years before! How delightful the battle when he would match himself against his fellows, against men born with greater advantages than his own, and in which he would come off victorious, winning not only wealth but honourable renown! And he had succeeded in nothing. It was only by an accident, he told himself, that he was not now sitting in a convict’s cell, or lying on a pallet in some prison infirmary. That he had escaped; but he had learned, or thought he had learned, that the prizes he had set his heart on were not worth winning. The whole world did not seem to him to hold anything worthy of the devotion of a lifetime. All this passed through his mind continually, in spite of the pain, but in a confused way, as if he had thought it all out and had wearied of it long ago. On the third day the doctor looked very grave, and said he would come again in the evening. ‘You think my son is worse, then?’ said Mr. Lindsay. The doctor paused for a moment. ‘We must hope for the best,’ he said at last. A chill struck to the father’s heart. Was it possible that this boy, of whom in secret he had been so proud, the only hope of his house, was to die? Inwardly he trembled, but outwardly he was as composed as ever. ‘Do you think,’ he said slowly, ‘that he ought to be told?’ ‘I think you might ask him if there is any friend he would like to see,’ said the doctor. ‘That will make him understand.’ When the doctor left him, the laird sat down in a kind of stupor. He could not believe it. Was he, an old man, not far from the grave, to live, while death seized his strong, bright-eyed boy? He shivered; and as he sat there alone he realized that the bereavement would be worse to him than it need have been. He had shown the lad but little of a father’s tenderness, little even of the tenderness which he actually felt. Alec had never confided in him, and he had resented the want of confidence. But he had never tried to see things from the boy’s standpoint; he had never made allowances for him, never yielded to him, never tried to sympathize with his plans. He had wished his son to be as himself. That could not be; and he had never acquiesced in the decree of nature which had given the young man other standards, other ideas, other aims, than his own. And now the end was come. He could not bring himself as yet to go upstairs and tell his son the truth. But Alec had already learned it. ‘Maggie,’ he said suddenly. ‘Does the doctor think I will get better?’ Margaret stepped back so that her brother could not see her face, and steadied her voice before she answered: