m a teaspoonful of strawberry juice, and hastened away.

"Good-bye, papa!" came forth the little feeble cry.

It was not heard. Mr. Carlyle was gone, gone from his living
child--forever. Up rose Lady Isabel, and flung her arms aloft in a storm
of sobs!

"Oh, William, darling! in this dying moment let me be to you as your
mother!"

Again he unclosed his wearied eyelids. It is probable that he only
partially understood.

"Papa's gone for her."

"Not _her_! I--I----" Lady Isabel checked herself, and fell sobbing on
the bed. No; not even at the last hour when the world was closing on
him, dared she say, I am your mother.

Wilson re-entered. "He looks as if he were dropping off to sleep," quoth
she.

"Yes," said Lady Isabel. "You need not wait, Wilson. I will ring if he
requires anything."

Wilson though withal not a bad-hearted woman, was not one to remain for
pleasure in a sick-room, if told she might leave it. She, Lady Isabel,
remained alone. She fell on her knees again, this time in prayer for the
departing spirit, on its wing, and that God would mercifully vouchsafe
herself a resting-place with it in heaven.

A review of the past then rose up before her, from the time of her first
entering that house, the bride of Mr. Carlyle, to her present sojourn in
it. The old scenes passed through her mind like the changing picture in
a phantasmagoria.

Why should they have come, there and then? She knew not.

William slept on silently; _she_ thought of the past. The dreadful
reflection, "If I had not done as I did, how different would it have
been now!" had been sounding its knell in her heart so often that she
had almost ceased to shudder at it. The very nails of her hands had,
before now, entered the palms, with the sharp pain it brought. Stealing
over her more especially this night, there, as she knelt, her head lying
on the counterpane, came the recollection of that first illness of hers.
How she had lain, and, in that unfounded jealousy, imagined Barbara the
house's mistress. She dead! Barbara exalted to her place. Mr. Carlyle's
wife, her child's stepmother! She recalled the day when, her mind
excited by a certain gossip of Wilson's--it was previously in a state of
fever bordering on delirium--she had prayed her husband, in terror and
anguish, not to marry Barbara. "How could he marry her?" he had replied,
in his soothing pity. "She, Isabel, was his wife. Who was Barbara?
Nothing to them?" But it had all come