y. I am thankful to say you won't find dirt or stuffiness
anywhere in this house. His lordship do look mortal badly,' added the
landlady, shaking her head dolefully; 'and I remember him such a fine
young gentleman, when he used to come down the Rothay with the otter
hounds, running along the bank--joomping in and out of the beck--up to
his knees in the water--and now to see him, so white and mashiated, and
broken-down like, in the very prime of life, all along of living out in
a hot country, among blackamoors, which is used to it--poor, ignorant
creatures--and never knew no better. It must be a hard trial for you, my
lady.'

'It is a hard trial.'

'Ah! we all have our trials, rich and poor,' sighed the woman, who
desired nothing better than to be allowed to unbosom her woes to the
grand looking lady in the fur-bordered cloth pelisse, with beautiful
dark hair piled up in clustering masses above a broad white forehead,
and slender white hands on which diamonds flashed and glittered in the
firelight, an unaccustomed figure by that rustic hearth.

'We all have our trials--high and low.'

'That reminds me,' said Lady Maulevrier, looking up at her, 'your
husband said you were in trouble. What did that mean?'

'Sickness in the house, my lady. A brother of mine that went to America
to make his fortune, and seemed to be doing so well for the first five
or six years, and wrote home such beautiful letters, and then left off
writing all at once, and we made sure as he was dead, and never got a
word from him for ten years, and just three weeks ago he drops in upon
us as we was sitting over our tea between the lights, looking as white
as a ghost. I gave a shriek when I saw him, for I was regular scared
out of my senses. "Robert's ghost!" I cried; but it was Robert himself,
come home to us to die. And he's lying upstairs now, with so little life
in him that I expect every breath to be his last.'

'What is his complaint?'

'Apathy, my lady. Dear, dear, that's not it. I never do remember the
doctor's foreign names.'

'Atrophy,' perhaps.

'Yes, my lady, that was it. Happen such crack-jaw words come easy to a
scholar like your ladyship.'

'Does the doctor give no hope?'

'Well, no, my lady. He don't go so far as to say there's no hope, though
Robert has been badly so long. It all depends, he says, upon the
rallying power of the constitution. The lungs are not gone, and the
heart is not diseased. If there's rallying power, Ro