"My daughter," said the sick man, "if I should never get off this bed again--and I feel that something great is conducting--when I am dead you will look to him for all advice and guidance. He will be your friend, your only friend, who can be of aid to you when I am dead. You will lean upon him. He will guard your money and see that no one does you ill or cheats you. He is an honest man, Maud. He has taken care of your fortune for me until now; he will take care of it for you when I am dead. You will have no one else but him; no friend in all the world but Henry Grey." "Oh, my God!" burst from the banker. If the hangman were in the room, and any word spoken by him, Grey, was to be the signal for his death, he could not restrain himself. For a moment they all three looked at him in grave surprise. His words were not perhaps improper to the grave occasion, but his manner of uttering them had something startling in it. There was in his tone a cry of wild appeal against an inexorable decree of prodigious woe. His voice had more the sound of a brute's inarticulate cry of despair than any human agony fitted to human words. It was a death-cry, the death-cry of some fine instinct of the human soul. It was a cry the like of which no man utters twice in a lifetime. The old man regarded the banker for a moment with a look of surprise. Then the expression of the old man's face softened, and he said: "Grey, my arm is weak. I cannot raise it. Take my hand. You will be good to her when I am dead. I know what the world may say. It may say, Grey, that you and I are not equals; that I might have bestowed the guardianship of my daughter's fortune among houses such as the Fleureys' or the Midharsts'. But I know what you are and what your father was, and I am placing what I value above all earthly things in your keeping. I am an old man, and the doctors may be right this time. I am old and weak, Henry Grey, and I want you to be her friend when I am dead. The world may say what it pleases about you as guardian. I am firm in my faith in you. No orphan, friendless--the last, I may say, of her house--had ever a more careful or prudent or wise guardian than you. I am old and weak. There is one more favour I would ask of you before you go--for I have said all. You will not refuse an old man on his death-bed, Henry Grey?" "No," in a faint thin whisper. "I am weak, and cannot do it myself. Raise up my hand held in yours, and place your hand against my lips, that I may kiss the hand which is to shield my daughter when I am gone." "Oh, Sir Alexander!" in a tone of agonized protest. "I am very old and very weak. You will not, because I am old and weak and cannot raise your hand, deny me this pleasure." The banker did as he was asked. When he had placed the cold thin hand back again on the bed, the baronet sighed and murmured: "I am tired. I will try to sleep awhile. You may go, Henry Grey. God bless you, Henry Grey! Now I am at rest!"