here was no help for it. They all did
their very utmost for him, and those last weeks of tender nursing were
perhaps the happiest of his life. Raeburn never allowed any one to see
how the lingering expectation, the dark shadow of the coming sorrow,
tried him. He lived his usual busy life, snatching an hour whenever he
could to help in the work of nursing, and bringing into the sick room
the strange influence of his strength and serenity.

The time wore slowly on. Haeberlein, though growing perceptibly weaker,
still lingered, able now and then to enter into conversation, but for
the most part just lying in patient silence, listening with a curious
impartiality to whatever they chose to read to him, or whatever they
began to talk about. He had all his life been a man of no particular
creed, and he retained his curious indifference to the end, though Erica
found that he had a sort of vague belief in a First Cause, and a shadowy
expectation of a personal existence after death. She found this out
through Brian, who had a way of getting at the minds of his patients.

One very hot afternoon she had been with him for several hours when
about five o'clock her father came into the room. Another prosecution
under the blasphemy Laws had just commenced. He had spent the whole day
in a stifling law court, and even to the dying man his exhaustion was
apparent.

"Things gone badly?" he asked.

"Much as I expected," said Raeburn, taking up a Marechal Niel rose
from the table and studying it abstractedly. "I've had a sentence
of Auerbach's in my head all day, 'The martyrdom of the modern world
consists of a long array of thousands of trifling annoyances.' These
things are in themselves insignificant, but multiplication makes them a
great power. You have been feeling this heat, I'm afraid. I will relieve
guard, Erica. Is your article ready?"

"Not quite," she replied, pausing to arrange Haeberlein's pillows while
her father raised him.

"Thank you, little Herzblattchen," he said, stroking her cheek, "auf
wiedersehen."

"Auf wiedersehen," she replied brightly and, gathering up some papers,
ran downstairs to finish her work for the "Daily Review."

A few minutes later Brian came in for his second visit.

"Any change?" he asked.

"None, I think," she answered, and went on with her writing with an
apprehensive glance every now and then at the clock. The office boy was
mercifully late however, and it must have been quite half an ho