sleeping again.

The mother put it back on Flora's breast, and, pressing the lady's hand,
whispered to her--

"Be a mother to my child."

Flora could not reply, but she nodded her head. Not a sound would come
to her lips, and she turned her head aside, lest the dying woman should
see the tears in her eyes.

Then Fanny folded her hands together on her breast, and murmured the
single prayer which she had been taught to say in her childhood--

"O God, my God, be merciful to me, poor sinful girl, now and for
evermore. Amen."

Then she cast down her eyes gently, and fell asleep.

"She has gone to sleep," murmured the husband, softly.

"She is dead," faltered the doctor, with a look of pity.

And the good old Nabob fell down on his knees beside the bed, and,
burying his head in the dead woman's pillows, sobbed bitterly, oh, so
bitterly!

CHAPTER XX.

SECRET VISITORS.

Soon came winter. The cold, frosty, snow-laden season began; nothing but
white forests, white fields, are to be seen in every quarter of the
level _Alfoeld_, and as early as four o'clock in the afternoon the
dark-grey, lilac-coloured atmosphere begins to envelope the horizon all
round about, rising higher and higher every moment, till at last the
very vault of heaven is reached, and it is night. Only the snowy
whiteness of the plain preserves some gleam of light to the landscape.

Pale fallow stripes appear to have been drawn across the snowy expanse;
they are the tracks of the sledges, stretching from one village to
another.

Karpathy Castle seemed to make the uniform monotonous landscape still
more melancholy. At other times the windows, of an evening, shed their
light far and wide, and merry groups of sportsmen bustled about the
well-filled courtyard; but now, scarcely more than a gleam of light was
to be seen in two or three of the windows, and only the blue smoke of
the chimneys showed that it was still inhabited.

Alone on these dun-coloured roads, in the fall of the long winter
evening, a peasant's sledge, without bells, might have been seen gliding
along through that featureless, semi-obscure wilderness towards Karpathy
Castle.

In the rear of the sledge sat a man wrapped in a simple mantle; in
front, a peasant, in a sheepskin _bunda_, was driving the two lean
horses.

The sitter behind frequently stood up in the sledge, and swept the plain
on every side, as if he were in search of something. The preserves of
the Karpath