The doctors ascertained the fact of the decease, and were too glad to leave the house of mourning. Evelyn, tearless, desolate, despairing, sank on her knees beside the couch—_she believed in prayers for the dead_. I knelt beside her, and our united supplications ascended to the throne of the Most High. At length I arose, and would have led the afflicted one away. She resisted. “I will not leave him,” she said. Finding it useless endeavoring to change her resolve, I went home, and returned later, determined not to give up the point. Reluctantly the mourner consented to take some repose. She arose from her knees; then suddenly, and as one frantic, she flung herself upon the lifeless corpse. “I will not leave thee, Philip—mine in death, if not in life.” She clung to the helpless clay, her warm, fresh mouth pressing the ice-cold lips, her pure breath entering the paralyzed lungs. The passionate heart, full of the magnetism of life, beating against that stone-cold breast—now, alas! still for ever. “Philip,” she cried again and again, straining the dear form closer and yet closer in her fond embrace, “come back to your Evelyn,” when, O wondrous to relate! the spirit just about to take wing, and emerge from the dark terrors of the “valley of the shadow of death,” or intermediate state, into life and immortality, paused,—wavered—looked back lovingly, and returned to the body. A Divine influx descending through that tender woman’s bosom, established a human sympathy once more with the apparently lifeless frame, and D’Arcy again breathed the breath of life. [Illustration] ------------------------------------------------------------------------ CHAPTER XXI. +ELLA+ EVELYN had saved Philip D’Arcy’s life, but almost at the cost of her own. The reaction from intense despair to the excess of joy, was too much for her, and to a deathlike swoon succeeded the frantic ravings of delirium. The fever of her beloved had fastened its cruel fangs in her very vitals. During weeks and weeks of suffering, I scarcely left the bedside of my poor friend—for ever and for ever did she utter the name of Philip, her true mate, her celestial bridegroom, her first, last, her only love. Unwilling that other ears should discover the secret of her heart, I permitted none to approach, cautiously concealing from Ella the dangerous nature of the malady, lest the dear girl should insist on sharing my anxious watch, and thus be made aware of her mother’s weakness—a weakness which, while pitying, I deeply deplored. Poor D’Arcy too, I remembered, must not be left alone with strangers. At my desire, therefore, Ella, accompanied by an elderly female attendant, supplied her mother’s place in the sick room of him who still required the utmost attention and solicitude. Many days elapsed ere the patient was pronounced out of danger, and permitted to speak.