When Maggie reached home that evening, in obedience to her father’s call, he was no longer insensible. About an hour before he had become conscious, and after vague, vacant looks around him, had muttered something about “a letter,” which he presently repeated impatiently. At the instance of Mr Turnbull, the medical man, Gore’s letter was brought and laid on the bed, and the previous impatience seemed to be allayed. The stricken man lay for some time with his eyes fixed on the letter, as if he were trying to knit up his thoughts by its help. But presently a new wave of memory seemed to have come and swept the other away; he turned his eyes from the letter to the door, and after looking uneasily, as if striving to see something his eyes were too dim for, he said, “The little wench.” He repeated the words impatiently from time to time, appearing entirely unconscious of everything except this one importunate want, and giving no sign of knowing his wife or any one else; and poor Mrs Tulliver, her feeble faculties almost paralyzed by this sudden accumulation of troubles, went backward and forward to the gate to see if the Laceham coach were coming, though it was not yet time. But it came at last, and set down the poor anxious girl, no longer the “little wench,” except to her father’s fond memory. “Oh, mother, what is the matter?” Maggie said, with pale lips, as her mother came toward her crying. She didn’t think her father was ill, because the letter had come at his dictation from the office at St Ogg’s. But Mr Turnbull came now to meet her; a medical man is the good angel of the troubled house, and Maggie ran toward the kind old friend, whom she remembered as long as she could remember anything, with a trembling, questioning look. “Don’t alarm yourself too much, my dear,” he said, taking her hand. “Your father has had a sudden attack, and has not quite recovered his memory. But he has been asking for you, and it will do him good to see you. Keep as quiet as you can; take off your things, and come upstairs with me.” Maggie obeyed, with that terrible beating of the heart which makes existence seem simply a painful pulsation. The very quietness with which Mr Turnbull spoke had frightened her susceptible imagination. Her father’s eyes were still turned uneasily toward the door when she entered and met the strange, yearning, helpless look that had been seeking her in vain. With a sudden flash and movement, he raised himself in the bed; she rushed toward him, and clasped him with agonised kisses. Poor child! it was very early for her to know one of those supreme moments in life when all we have hoped or delighted in, all we can dread or endure, falls away from our regard as insignificant; is lost, like a trivial memory, in that simple, primitive love which knits us to the beings who have been nearest to us, in their times of helplessness or of anguish.