me
Vine and Wilson, grasping them convulsively.

"Don't let me fall! Don't let me fall!" he gasped.

"My dear, you cannot fall," responded Madame Vine. "You forget that you
are on the bed."

He clasped them yet, and trembled still, as from fear. "Don't let me
fall! Don't let me fall" the incessant burden of his cry.

The paroxysm passed. They wiped his brow, and stood looking at him;
Wilson with a pursed up mouth, and a peculiar expression of face. She
put a spoonful of restorative jelly between his lips, and he swallowed
it, but shook his head when she would have given him another. Turning
his face to the pillow, in a few minutes he was in a doze.

"What could it have been?" exclaimed Lady Isabel, in an undertone, to
Wilson.

"_I_ know," was the oracular answer. "I saw this same sort of an attack
once before, madame."

"And what caused it?"

"Twasn't in a child though," went on Wilson--"'twas in a grown person.
But that's nothing, it comes for the same thing in all. I think he was
taken for death."

"Who?" uttered Lady Isabel, startled.

Wilson made no reply in words, but she pointed with her finger to the
bed.

"Oh, Wilson, he is not so ill as that. Mr. Wainwright said this morning,
that he might last a week or two."

Wilson composedly sat herself down in the easiest chair. She was not
wont to put herself out of the way for the governess; and that governess
was too much afraid of her, in one sense, to let her know her place.
"As to Wainwright, he's nobody," quoth she. "And if he saw the child's
breath going out before his face, and knew that the next moment would be
his last, he'd vow to us all that he was good for twelve hours to
come. You don't know Wainwright as I do, madame. He was our doctor at
mother's; and he has attended in all the places I have lived in since I
went out to service. Five years I was maid at Mrs. Hare's. I came here
when Miss Lucy was a baby, and in all my places has he attended, like
one's shadow. My Lady Isabel thought great guns of old Wainwright, I
remember. It was more than I did."

My Lady Isabel made no response to this. She took a seat and watched
William through her glasses. His breathing was more labored than usual.

"That idiot, Sarah, says to me to-day, says she, 'Which of his two
grandpapas will they bury him by, old Mr. Carlyle or Lord Mount Severn?'
'Don't be a calf!' I answered her. 'D'ye think they'll stick him out
in the corner with my lord?--he'll be put in