st with both hands). "Wilfrid, will you stay here?"

"For God's sake, go to him, Wilfrid," murmured Adela. "I can't."

"Because if you do--if you don't--I mean, if you go..." The old man
gasped at the undertone. "Now I have got it in my throat."

A quick physical fear caught hold of him. In a moment his voice changed
to entreaty. "I beg you won't go, my dear boy. Wilfrid, I tell you, don't
go. Because, you wouldn't act like a d--d--I'm not angry; but it is like
acting like a--Here's company, Wilfrid; come to me, my boy; do come here.
You mayn't ha--have your poor old father long, now he's got you u--up in
the world. I mean accidents, for I'm sound enough; only a little nervous
from brain--Is he gone?"

Wilfrid was then leaving the room.

Lady Gosstre had been speaking to Mr. Powys. She was about to say a word
to Lady Charlotte, when the latter walked to the doorway, and. In a
manner that smote his heart with a spasm of gratitude, said; "Don't heed
these people. He will bring on a fit if you don't stop. His nerves are
out, and the wine they have given him... Go to him: I will go to Emilia,
and do as much for her as you could."

Wilfrid reached his father in time to see him stagger back into the arms
of Mrs. Chump, whose supplication was for the female stimulant known as
'something.'

CHAPTER XXXIII

On reaching home that night, Arabella surprised herself thinking, in the
midst of her anguish: "Whatever is said of us, it cannot be said that
there is a house where the servants have been better cared for." And this
reflection continued to burn with an astounding brilliancy through all
the revolutions of a mind contemplating the dread of a fallen fortune,
the fact of a public exposure, and what was to her an ambition destroyed.
Adela had no such thoughts. "I have been walking on a plank," she gasped
from time to time, as she gave startled glances into the abyss of
poverty, and hurried to her bedchamber--a faint whisper of
self-condemnation in her ears at the 'I' being foremost. The sisters were
too proud to touch upon one another's misery in complaints, or to be
common by holding debate on it. They had not once let their eyes meet at
Besworth, as the Tinleys wonderingly noticed. They said good night to
their papa, who was well enough to reply, adding peremptorily,
"Downstairs at half-past eight,"--an intimation that he would be at the
break-fast table and read prayers as usual. Inexperienced in nervous
disease