Edith was startled. Even her positive, healthful nature began to yield to the contagion of Laura's morbid despair. She felt that she must break the spell and be alone. By a strong effort she tried to speak in her natural tone and with confidence. She tried to comfort the desperate woman by endearing epithets, as if she were a child. She spoke of those simple restoratives which are so often and vainly prescribed for mortal wounds, sleep and rest. "Go to bed, poor child," she urged. "All will look differently in the sunlight to-morrow." But Laura scarcely seemed to heed her. With weak, uncertain steps she drew near the bed, and turned the light on her mother's thin, flushed face, and stood, with clasped hands, looking wistfully at her. "Yes, my dear," muttered Mrs. Allen in her delirium, "both your father and myself would give our full approval to your marriage with Mr. Goulden." The poor woman made watching doubly hard to her daughters, since she kept recalling to them the happy past in all its minutiae. Laura turned to Edith with a smile that was inexpressibly sad, and said, "What a mockery it all is! There seems nothing real in this world but pain and danger. Oh, that I was not afraid to die!" "Laura, Laura! go to your rest," exclaimed Edith, "or you will lose your reason. Come;" and she half carried the poor creature to her room. "Now, leave the door ajar," she said, "for if mother is worse I will call you." Edith sat down to her weary task as a watcher, and never before, in all the sad preceding weeks, had her heart been so heavy, and so prophetic of evil, Laura's words kept repeating themselves to her, and mingling with those of her mother's delirium, thus strangely blending the past and the present. Could it be true that they were helpless in the hands of a cruel, remorseless fate, that was pushing them down? Could it be true that all her struggles and courage would be in vain, and that each day was only bringing them nearer to the desperation of utter want? She could not disguise from herself that Laura's dreadful words had a show of reason, and that, perhaps, the mortgage she had given that day meant that they would soon be without home or shelter in the great, pitiless world. But, with set teeth and white face, she muttered: "Death first." Then, with a startled expression, she anxiously asked herself: "Was that what Laura meant when she kept saying, 'Oh, if I wasn't afraid to die!'" She went to her sister's door and listened. Laura's movements within seemed to satisfy her, and she returned to the sick-room and sat down again. Putting her hand upon her heart, she murmured: "I am completely unnerved to-night. I don't understand myself;" and she looked almost as pale and despairing as Laura. She was, in truth, in the midst of that "horror of great darkness" that comes to so many struggling souls in a world upon which the shadow of sin rests so heavily. CHAPTER XXYI FRIEND AND SAVIOUR