times, and always says that he is dying. I had
better go up and say that you are here."

"And what does my mother think of it?"

"She has never left him, and therefore I cannot tell; but I know from
her face that she thinks that he is--dying. Shall I go up, Herbert?"
and so she went, and Herbert, following softly on his toes, stood
in the corridor outside the bedroom-door, waiting till his arrival
should have been announced. It was but a minute, and then his sister,
returning to the door, summoned him to enter.

The room had been nearly darkened, but as there were no curtains to
the bed, Herbert could see his mother's face as she knelt on a stool
at the bedside. His father was turned away from him, and lay with his
hand inside his wife's, and Emmeline was sitting on the foot of the
bed, with her face between her hands, striving to stifle her sobs.
"Here is Herbert now, dearest," said Lady Fitzgerald, with a low,
soft voice, almost a whisper, yet clear enough to cause no effort in
the hearing. "I knew that he would not be long." And Herbert, obeying
the signal of his mother's eye, passed round to the other side of the
bed.

"Father," said he, "are you not so well to-day?"

"My poor boy, my poor ruined boy!" said the dying man, hardly
articulating the words as he dropped his wife's hand and took that
of his son. Herbert found that it was wet, and clammy, and cold, and
almost powerless in its feeble grasp.

"Dearest father, you are wrong if you let that trouble you; all that
will never trouble me. Is it not well that a man should earn his own
bread? Is it not the lot of all good men?" But still the old man
murmured with his broken voice, "My poor boy, my poor boy!"

The hopes and aspirations of his eldest son are as the breath of his
nostrils to an Englishman who has been born to land and fortune.
What had not this poor man endured in order that his son might be
Sir Herbert Fitzgerald of Castle Richmond? But this was no longer
possible; and from the moment that this had been brought home to him,
the father had felt that for him there was nothing left but to die.
"My poor boy," he muttered, "tell me that you have forgiven me."

And then they all knelt round the bed and prayed with him; and
afterwards they tried to comfort him, telling him how good he had
been to them; and his wife whispered in his ear that if there had
been fault, the fault was hers, but that her conscience told her that
such fault had been forgi