"By Jea! Here's modesty!" said Sir Harry, exploding in a gruff laugh of scorn, and standing up. "What a pack o' gaumless gannets you must take us for! Look-ye now, young sir. I have my own opinion about all that. And tell your superiors, as you call them, they'll never get a plack of old Harry Rokestone's money, while hand and seal can bind, and law's law; and if I catch a priest in my house, ye may swear he'll get out of it quicker than he came in. I'd thank you more for your letter, sir, if I was a little more sure of the motive; and now I've said my say, and I wish ye good evening." With a fierce smile, the old man looked at him steadily for a few seconds, and then turning abruptly, left the room and shut the door, with a firm clap, after him. That was, to me, an anxious night. Mamma continued ill; I had written rather a wild note for our doctor; but he did not come for many hours. He did not say much; he wrote a prescription, and gave some directions; he was serious and reserved, which, in a physician, means alarm. In answer to my flurried inquiries, as I went downstairs by his side, he said: "I told you, you recollect, that it is a capricious kind of thing; I hope she may be better when I look in in the morning; the nature of it is that it may end at any time, with very little warning; but with caution she may live a year, or possibly two years. I've known cases, as discouraging as hers, where life has been prolonged for three years." Next morning came, and I thought mamma much better. I told her all that was cheery in the doctor's opinion, and amused her with plans for our future. But the hour was drawing near when doctors' opinions, and friends' hopes and flatteries, and the kindly illusions of plans looking pleasantly into an indefinite future, were to be swallowed in the tremendous event. About half an hour before our kind doctor's call, mamma's faintness returned. I now began, and not an hour too soon, to despair. The medicine he had ordered the day before, to support her in those paroxysms, had lost its power. Mamma had been for a time in the drawing-room, but having had a long fainting-fit there, I persuaded her, so soon as she was a little recovered, to return to her bed. I find it difficult, I may say, indeed, impossible, to reduce the occurrences of this day to order. The picture is not, indeed, so chaotic as my recollection of the times and events that attended my darling Nelly's death. The shock, in that case, had affected my mind. But I do not believe that any one retains a perfectly arranged recollection of the flurried and startling scenes that wind up our hopes in the dread catastrophe. I never met a person yet who could have told the story of such a day with perfect accuracy and order.