When the doctor arrived he gave no hope of permanent improvement. The captain, said he, must be kept quiet; supposing that nothing were allowed to agitate him, he might in part recover his faculties, but this was rather to be desired than to be anticipated. Mrs. Jose carried off Winefred. It was advisable that the girl should not be in the house, and Jack and Mrs. Marley undertook to sit up with the patient during the night, taking their watches alternately; Jack to wake the first part. Between twelve and one the young man roused Mrs. Marley and retired to bed. His father was in much the same condition, apparently; he had remained perfectly quiet, and had slept. Jane left her bed on being summoned. She had not taken off her clothes. She found the fire made up and the kettle on the boil at the side. Jack had been sitting before the grate, and had made some grog, sufficient to moisten his throat, and to help him to spend the hours, but he had taken a moderate amount only. Jane seated herself near the sick-bed and took her knitting. The captain's eyes were closed, not shut, and she could see the glitter of the eyeballs under the lashes; but whether he slept imperfectly, or whether he was half-awake and was observing her, she could not decide. There is no occupation like knitting for breeding thought. A man smokes to encourage concentration of his mental faculties; but a woman, when she knits, diffuses her thoughts, they spread like the antennæ of a sea-anemone in all directions, and lay hold of everything that drifts by in the current of memory, to draw it in, twist, distort, magnify it, take it into the innermost receptacles, and there suffer indigestion from it, often in the acutest form. As Jane worked with nimble fingers her mind was busy, busy mainly over Job's accumulations. Not for an instant did she question the suggestion that they were acquired by defrauding her father and brother, nor did she doubt that her brother's death had been procured by the man now lying powerless in her presence. She had not inquired of others whether what Dench had thrown out was an opinion generally entertained, whether it had any foundation whatever. She accepted the assumption as a self-evident fact, and started from it. Jane Marley was in no little degree concerned about her own future and that of her child. The captain would not last many days, and she would then have to leave the Undercliff, as the house would pass to Jack. It was a freehold, acquired originally by squatting on the land a generation ago.