Mathilde? I should hardly expect to see him alive
again."

"Alive again!" said Hilda, with a singular intonation.

"Yes; Mathilde is an excellent maid, but in a sick-room she is as
helpless as a child. She is far worse than I am. Do we ever venture
to leave him alone with her?"

"Never mind. Do you go to sleep, darling, and sweet dreams to you."

They kissed, and Zillah went to her chamber.

It was about dawn, and the morning twilight but dimly illumined the
hall. The Earl's room was dark, and the faint night light made
objects only indistinctly perceptible. The Earl's white face was
turned toward the door as Hilda entered, with imploring, wistful
expectancy upon it. As he caught sight of Hilda the expression turned
to one of fear--that same fear which Zillah had seen upon it. What
did he fear? What was it that was upon his mind? What fearful thought
threw its shadow over his soul?

Hilda looked at him for a long time in silence, her face calm and
impassive, her eyes intent upon him. The Earl looked back upon her
with unchanged fear--looking back thus out of his weakness and
helplessness, with a fear that seemed intensified by the
consciousness of that weakness. But Hilda's face softened not; no
gleam of tenderness mitigated the hard lustre of her eyes; her
expression lessened not from its set purpose. The Earl said not one
word. It was not to her that he would utter the fear that was in him.
Zillah had promised to send Mrs. Hart. When would Mrs. Hart come?
Would she ever come, or would she never come? He looked away from
Hilda feverishly, anxiously, to the door; he strained his ears to
listen for footsteps. But no footsteps broke the deep stillness that
reigned through the vast house, where all slept except these two who
faced each other in the sick-room.

There was a clock at the end of the corridor outside, whose ticking
sounded dull and muffled from the distance, yet it penetrated, with
clear, sharp vibrations, to the brain of the sick man, and seemed to
him, in the gathering excitement of this fearful hour, to grow louder
and louder, till each tick sounded to his sharpened sense like the
vibrations of a bell, and seemed to be the funeral knell of his
destiny; sounding thus to his ears, solemnly, fatefully, bodingly;
pealing forth thus with every sound the announcement that second
after second out of those few minutes of time which were still left
him had passed away from him forever. Each one of those sec