could claim the property, what would be
the consequence? She felt herself in a mist of ignorance and perplexity;
dreading the consequences, yet feeling as if her own removal might
leave her fortune free to make up for them. She tried to scrawl an
explanation; but mind and fingers were alike unequal to the task, and
she desisted just as fresh torture began at the doctor's hands--torture
from which they sent her mother away, and that left her exhausted, and
despairing of holding out through a repetition.

And then--and then! "Tell me of my Saviour," the dying child had said;
and the drawn face had lightened at the words to which Rachel's oracles
declared that people attached crude or arbitrary meanings; and now she
hardly knew what they conveyed to her, and longed, as for something far
away, for the reality of those simple teachings--once realities, now
all by rote! Saved by faith! What was faith? Could all depend on a
last sensation? And as to her life. Failure, failure through headstrong
blindness and self-will, resulting in the agony of the innocent. Was
this ground of hope? She tried to think of progress and purification
beyond the grave; but this was the most speculative, insecure fabric of
all. There was no habit of trust to it--no inward conviction, no outward
testimony. And even when the extreme danger subsided, and Francis Temple
was known to be better, Rachel found that her sorrow was not yet
ended: for Conrade had been brought home with the symptoms of the
complaint--Conrade, the most beloved and loving of Fanny's little ones,
the only one who really remembered his father, was in exceeding, almost
hopeless peril, watched day and night by his mother and Miss Williams.

The little Alice, Maria Hatherton's own child, had lingered and
struggled long, but all the care and kindness of the good Sisters at
St. Norbert's had been unavailing, she had sunk at last, and the mother
remained in a dull, silent, tearless misery, quietly doing all that was
required of her, but never speaking nor giving the ladies any opening to
try to make an impression upon her.

Rachel gleaned more intelligence than her mother meant her to obtain,
and brooded over it in her weakness and her silence.

Recovery is often more trying than illness, and Rachel suffered greatly.
Indeed, she was not sure that she ought to have recovered at all, and
perhaps the shock to her nerves and spirits was more serious than
the effect of the sharp passing d