“Herr Haeberlein has come here to be nursed,” said Raeburn when the greetings were over. “Will you see that a room is got ready, dear?” He went out into the hall to dismiss the cab, and Haeberlein seized the opportunity to correct his words. “He thinks I shall get better, but it is impossible, my Herzblattchen; it is only a question of weeks now, possibly only of days. Was I wrong to come to you?” “Of course not,” she said with the sort of tender deference with which she always spoke to him. “Did you think father would let you go anywhere else?” “I didn't think about it,” said Haeberlein wearily; “but he wouldn't, you see.” Raeburn returned while he was speaking, and Erica went away quickly to see to the necessary preparations. Herr Haeberlein had come, and she did not for a moment question the rightness of her father's decision; but yet in her heart she was troubled about it, and she could see that both her aunt and Tom were troubled too. The fact was that for some time they had seen plainly enough that Raeburn's health was failing, and they dreaded any additional anxiety for him. A man can not be involved in continual and harassing litigation and at the same time agitate perseveringly for reform, edit a newspaper, write books, rush from Land's End to John O'Groat's, deliver lectures, speak at mass meetings, teach science, befriend every unjustly used person, and go through the enormous amount of correspondence, personal supervision, and inevitable interviewing which falls to the lot of every popular leader, without sooner or later breaking down. Haeberlein had come, however, and there was no help for it. They all did their very utmost for him, and those last weeks of tender nursing were perhaps the happiest of his life. Raeburn never allowed any one to see how the lingering expectation, the dark shadow of the coming sorrow, tried him. He lived his usual busy life, snatching an hour whenever he could to help in the work of nursing, and bringing into the sick room the strange influence of his strength and serenity. The time wore slowly on. Haeberlein, though growing perceptibly weaker, still lingered, able now and then to enter into conversation, but for the most part just lying in patient silence, listening with a curious impartiality to whatever they chose to read to him, or whatever they began to talk about. He had all his life been a man of no particular creed, and he retained his curious indifference to the end, though Erica found that he had a sort of vague belief in a First Cause, and a shadowy expectation of a personal existence after death. She found this out through Brian, who had a way of getting at the minds of his patients. One very hot afternoon she had been with him for several hours when about five o'clock her father came into the room. Another prosecution under the blasphemy Laws had just commenced. He had spent the whole day in a stifling law court, and even to the dying man his exhaustion was apparent.