'This is Brandon?' murmured Lake. 'Yes, dear.' She thought he was going to say more, but he remained silent, and she recollected that he ought not to speak, and also that she had that to say which must be said. Sharp, dark, and strange lay that familiar face upon the white pillow. The faintest indication of something like a peevish sneer; it might be only the lines of pain and fatigue; still it had that unpleasant character remaining fixed on its features. 'Oh, Stanley! you say you think you are dying. Won't you send for William Wylder and Chelford, and tell all you know of Mark?' She saw he was about to say something, and she leaned her head near his lips, and she heard him whisper,-- 'It won't serve Mark.' 'I'm thinking of _you_, Stanley--I'm thinking of you.' To which he said either 'Yes' or 'So.' She could not distinguish. 'I view it now quite differently. You said, you know, in the park, you would tell Chelford; and I resisted, I believe, but I don't now. I had _rather_ you did. Yes, Stanley, I conjure you to tell it all.' The cold lips, with a livid halo round them, murmured, 'Thank you.' It was a sneer, very shocking just then, perhaps; but unquestionably a sneer. 'Poor Stanley!' she murmured, with a kind of agony, looking down upon that changed face. 'One word more, Stanley. Remember, it's I, the only one on earth who stands near you in kindred, your sister, Stanley, who implores of you to take this step before it is too late; at least, to consider.' He said something. She thought it was 'I'll think;' and then he closed his eyes. It was the only motion she had observed, his face lay just as it had done on the pillow. He had not stirred all the time she was there; and now that his eyelids closed, it seemed to say, our interview is over--the curtain has dropped; and so understanding it, with that one awful look that may be the last, she glided from the bed-side, told old Dorothy that he seemed disposed to sleep, and left the room. There is something awful always in the spectacle of such a sick-bed as that beside which Rachel had just stood. But not quite so dreadful is the sight as are the imaginings and the despair of absence. So reassuring is the familiar spectacle of life, even in its subsidence, so long as bodily torture and mental aberration are absent. In the meanwhile, on his return to the library, Lord Chelford found his dowager mother in high chat with the attorney, whom she afterwards pronounced 'a very gentlemanlike man for his line of life.' The conversation, indeed, was chiefly that of Lady Chelford, the exemplary attorney contributing, for the most part, a polite acquiescence, and those reflections which most appositely pointed the moral of her ladyship's tale, which concerned altogether the vagaries of Mark Wylder--a subject which piqued her curiosity and irritated her passions.