o gleam of
hope therefore cheered my friends.

While fever producing torpor, heavy pains, sitting like lead on my limbs,
and making my breast heave, were upon me; I continued insensible to every
thing but pain, and at last even to that. I awoke on the fourth morning as
from a dreamless sleep. An irritating sense of thirst, and, when I strove
to speak or move, an entire dereliction of power, was all I felt.

For three days and nights Idris had not moved from my side. She
administered to all my wants, and never slept nor rested. She did not hope;
and therefore she neither endeavoured to read the physician's countenance,
nor to watch for symptoms of recovery. All her thought was to attend on me
to the last, and then to lie down and die beside me. On the third night
animation was suspended; to the eye and touch of all I was dead. With
earnest prayer, almost with force, Adrian tried to draw Idris from me. He
exhausted every adjuration, her child's welfare and his own. She shook her
head, and wiped a stealing tear from her sunk cheek, but would not yield;
she entreated to be allowed to watch me that one night only, with such
affliction and meek earnestness, that she gained her point, and sat silent
and motionless, except when, stung by intolerable remembrance, she kissed
my closed eyes and pallid lips, and pressed my stiffening hands to her
beating heart.

At dead of night, when, though it was mid winter, the cock crowed at three
o'clock, as herald of the morning change, while hanging over me, and
mourning in silent, bitter thought for the loss of all of love towards her
that had been enshrined in my heart; her dishevelled hair hung over her
face, and the long tresses fell on the bed; she saw one ringlet in motion,
and the scattered hair slightly stirred, as by a breath. It is not so, she
thought, for he will never breathe more. Several times the same thing
occurred, and she only marked it by the same reflection; till the whole
ringlet waved back, and she thought she saw my breast heave. Her first
emotion was deadly fear, cold dew stood on her brow; my eyes half opened;
and, re-assured, she would have exclaimed, "He lives!" but the words were
choked by a spasm, and she fell with a groan on the floor.

Adrian was in the chamber. After long watching, he had unwillingly fallen
into a sleep. He started up, and beheld his sister senseless on the earth,
weltering in a stream of blood that gushed from her mouth. Encreasing signs