eck, and kissed me. "I didn't mean to speak so harshly," said the
gentle affectionate creature. "Sister! my heart is heavy. My life to come
never looked so dark to my blind eyes as it looks now." A tear dropped
from those poor sightless eyes on my cheek. She turned her head aside
abruptly. "Forgive me," she murmured, "and let me go." Before I could
answer, she hurried away to hide herself in her room. The sweet girl! How
you would have pitied her--how you would have loved her!

I went out alone for my walk. She had not infected me with her
superstitious foreboding of ill things to come. But there was one sad
word that she had said, in which I could not but agree. After what I had
witnessed in that room, the wedding-day did indeed look further off than
ever.

CHAPTER THE EIGHTEENTH

Family Troubles

IN four or five days more, Lucilla's melancholy doubts about Oscar were
confirmed. He was attacked by a second fit.

The promised consultation with the physician from Brighton took place.
Our new doctor did not encourage us to hope. The second fit following so
close on the first was, in his opinion, a bad sign. He gave general
directions for the treatment of Oscar; and left him to decide for himself
whether he would or would not try change of scene. No change, the
physician appeared to think, would exert any immediate influence on the
recurrence of the epileptic attacks. The patient's general health might
be benefited, and that was all. As for the question of the marriage, he
declared without hesitation that we must for the present dismiss all
consideration of it from our minds.

Lucilla received the account of what passed at the visit of the doctors
with a stubborn resignation which it distressed me to see. "Remember what
I told you when the first attack seized him," she said. "Our summer-time
is ended; our winter is come."

Her manner, while she spoke, was the manner of a person who is waiting
without hope--who feels deliberately that calamity is near. She only
roused herself when Oscar came in. He was, naturally enough, in miserable
spirits, under the sudden alteration in all his prospects. Lucilla did
her best to cheer him, and succeeded. On my side, I tried vainly to
persuade him to leave Browndown and amuse himself in some gayer place. He
shrank from new faces and new scenes. Between these two unelastic young
people, I felt even my native good spirits beginning to sink. If we had
been all three down in the b