is work, and did not leave the woman until she was better. That was the
best of Jan Verner. He paid every atom as much attention to the poor as
he did to the rich. Jan never considered who or what his patients were:
all his object was, to get them well.

His nearest way home lay past the pool, and he took it: _he_ did not
fear poor Rachel's ghost. It was a sharpish night, bright, somewhat of a
frost. As Jan neared the pool, he turned his head towards it and half
stopped, gazing on its still waters. He had been away when the
catastrophe happened; but the circumstances had been detailed to him.
"How it would startle Jack and a few of those timid ones," said he
aloud, "if some night--"

"Is that you, sir?"

Some persons, with nerves less serene than Jan's, might have started at
the sudden interruption there and then. Not so Jan. He turned round with
composure, and saw Bennet, the footman from Verner's Pride. The man had
come up hastily from behind the hedge.

"I have been to your house, sir, and they told me you were at the
gamekeeper's, so I was hastening there. My mistress is taken ill, sir."

"Is it a fit?" cried Jan, remembering his fears and prognostications,
with regard to Mrs. Verner.

"It's worse than that, sir; it's appleplexy. Leastways, sir, my master
and Mrs. Tynn's afraid that it is. She looks like dead, sir, and there's
froth on her mouth."

Jan waited for no more. He turned short round, and flew by the nearest
path to Verner's Pride.

The evil had come. Apoplexy it indeed was, and Jan feared that all his
efforts to remedy it would be of no avail.

"It was by the merest chance that I found it out, sir," Mrs. Tynn said
to him. "I happened to wake up, and I thought how quiet my mistress was
lying; mostly she might be heard ever so far off when she was asleep. I
got up, sir, and took the rushlight out of the shade, and looked at her.
And then I saw what had happened, and went and called Mr. Lionel."

"Can you restore her, Jan?" whispered Lionel.

Jan made no reply. He had his own private opinion; but, whatever that
may have been, he set himself to the task in right earnest.

She never rallied. She lived only until the dawn of morning. Scarcely
had the clock told eight, when the death-bell went booming over the
village; the bell of that very church which had recently been so merry
for the succession of Lionel. And when people came running from far and
near to inquire for whom the passing-bell was ri