"I shall speak," cried Sarah Anne, with a touch, feeble though it was, of her old peevish vehemence. "Nobody's thought of but Ethel. If you had had your way," looking hard at Mr. Godolphin, "she wouldn't have been allowed to come near me; no, not if I had died." Her mood changed to tears. Lady Sarah whispered to him to leave the room: it would not do, this excitement. Thomas wondered why he had been brought to it. "I will come and see you again when you are better," he soothingly whispered. "No you won't," sobbed Sarah Anne. "You are going to Scotland, and I shall be dead when you come back. I don't want to die. Why do they frighten me with their prayers? Good-bye, Thomas Godolphin." The last words were called after him; when he had taken his leave of her and was quitting the room. Lady Sarah attended him to the threshold: her eyes full, her hands lifted. "You may see that there's no hope of her!" she wailed. Thomas did not think there was the slightest hope. To his eye--though it was not so practised an eye in sickness as Mr. Snow's, or even as that of the Rector of All Souls'--it appeared that in a very few days, perhaps hours, hope for Sarah Anne Grame would be over for ever. Ethel waited for him in the hall, and was leading the way back to the drawing-room; but he told her he could not stay longer, and opened the front door. She ran past him into the garden, putting her hand into his as he came out. "I wish you were not going away," she sadly said, her spirits, that night very unequal, causing her to see things with a gloomy eye. "I wish you were going with me!" replied Thomas Godolphin. "Do not weep, Ethel. I shall soon be back again." "Everything seems to make me weep to-night. You may not be back until--until the worst is over. Oh! if she might but be saved!" He held her face close to him, gazing down at it in the moonlight. And then he took from it his farewell kiss. "God bless you, my darling, for ever and for ever!" "May He bless you, Thomas!" she answered, with streaming eyes: and, for the first time in her life, his kiss was returned. Then they parted. He watched Ethel indoors, and went back to Prior's Ash. CHAPTER XII. DEAD. "Thomas, my son, I must go home. I don't want to die away from Ashlydyat!" A dull pain shot across Thomas Godolphin's heart at the words. Did he think of the old superstitious tradition--that evil was to fall upon the Godolphins when their chief should die, and not at Ashlydyat? At Ashlydyat his father could not die; he had put that out of his power when he let it to strangers: in its neighbourhood, he might. "The better plan, sir, will be for you to return to the Folly, as you seem to wish it," said Thomas. "You will soon be strong enough to undertake the journey."