While Mr. Justice Whistler and his colleagues had been proceeding in their examinations, and the events we have just narrated had been taking place in a distant part of the country, the days and nights in the little village of Danemore had been spent in the slow and wearing anxieties of watching the progress of sickness towards death. Alice Herbert remained almost constantly with the Earl, at his own earnest wish, and Sir Walter Herbert coming over from the Manor House early every day, spent the greater part of his time with Langford, in all those various occupations of which the circumstances in which they both stood furnished an abundance to fill up the time. The Earl of Danemore lay upon his bed of sickness, and hour by hour showed as it went by, that it would be the bed of death also. It was not, indeed, that his wounds were mortal, for no vital part in all his frame had been touched; but he received those wounds, not only as an old man in whom the loss even of a portion of that strange red current that flows within our veins, dispensing life and vigour, is not easily restored; he received them also as one on whom strong and ungovernable passions had already wrought most powerfully, and on whom also the same intensity of feeling was still destined to work, though excited by better causes, and a better purpose. Weakened by great loss of blood, exhausted by fatigue and excitement, but little was wanting to bring fever in the train of corporeal injury; and the energetic eagerness with which he applied his mind to everything connected with Henry Langford, only served to increase his irritability, rather than to lead his mind to calmer and more tranquillizing subjects. He felt that his days on earth were numbered: and that feeling begat in him an anxiety to make up for the evils he had inflicted, which tended to shorten those few hours that remained to him.