on her head as he passed. "Thank you for all,
my dear child!" and there was a strange tone of pain in his low voice as
he spoke it.

Only Decima was in the room then, and she quitted it as Lionel entered.
Treading softly across the carpet, he took his seat in a chair opposite
Sibylla's couch. She slept--for a great wonder--or appeared to sleep.
The whole morning long--nay, the whole night long, her bright, restless
eyes had been wide open; sleep as far from her as it could well be. It
had seemed that her fractious temper kept the sleep away. But her eyes
were closed now, and two dark, purple rims inclosed them, terribly dark
on the wan, white face. Suddenly the eyes unclosed with a start, as if
her doze had been abruptly disturbed, though Lionel had been perfectly
still. She looked at him for a minute or two in silence, and he, knowing
it would be well that she should doze again, neither spoke nor moved.

"Lionel, am I dying?"

Quietly as the words were spoken, they struck on his ear with startling
intensity. He rose then and pushed her hair from her damp brow with a
fond hand, murmuring some general inquiry as to how she felt.

"Am I dying?" came again from the panting lips.

What was he to answer her? To say that she was dying might send her into
a paroxysm of terror; to deceive her in that awful hour by telling her
she was not, went against every feeling of his heart.

"But I don't want to die," she urged, in some excitement, interpreting
his silence to mean the worst. "Can't Jan do anything for me? Can't Dr.
Hayes?"

"Dr. Hayes will be here soon," observed Lionel soothingly, if somewhat
evasively. "He will come by the next train."

She took his hand, held it between hers, and looked beseechingly up to
his face. "I don't want to leave you," she whispered. "Oh, Lionel! keep
me here if you can! You know you are always kind to me. Sometimes I have
reproached you that you were not, but it was not true. You have been
ever kind, have you not?"

"I have ever striven to be so," he answered, the tears glistening on his
eyelashes.

"I don't want to die. I want to get well and go about again, as I used
to do when at Verner's Pride. Now Sir Edmund Hautley is come home, that
will be a good place to visit at. Lionel, I don't want to die! _Can't_
you keep me in life?"

"If by sacrificing my own life, I could save yours, Heaven knows how
willingly I would do it," he tenderly answered.

"Why should I die? Why should I