ven; and while she said this she motioned
the children away from him, and strove to make him understand that
human misery could never kill the soul, and should never utterly
depress the spirit. "Dearest love," she said, still whispering to
him in her low, sweet voice--so dear to him, but utterly inaudible
beyond--"if you would cease to accuse yourself so bitterly, you might
yet be better, and remain with us to comfort us."

But the slender, half-knit man, whose arms are without muscles and
whose back is without pith, will strive in vain to lift the weight
which the brawny vigour of another tosses from the ground almost
without an effort. It is with the mind and the spirit as with the
body; only this, that the muscles of the body can be measured, but
not so those of the spirit. Lady Fitzgerald was made of other stuff
than Sir Thomas; and that which to her had cost an effort, but with
an effort had been done surely, was to him as impossible as the
labour of Hercules. "My poor boy, my poor ruined boy!" he still
muttered, as she strove to comfort him.

"Mamma has sent for Mr. Townsend," Emmeline whispered to her brother,
as they stood together in the bow of the window.

"And do you really think he is so bad as that?"

"I am sure that mamma does. I believe he had some sort of a fit
before you came. At any rate, he did not speak for two hours."

"And was not Finucane here?" Finucane was the Mallow doctor.

"Yes; but he had left before papa became so much worse. Mamma has
sent for him also."

But I do not know that it boots to dally longer in a dying chamber.
It is an axiom of old that the stage curtain should be drawn before
the inexorable one enters in upon his final work. Doctor Finucane did
come, but his coming was all in vain. Sir Thomas had known that it
was in vain, and so also had his patient wife. There was that mind
diseased, towards the cure of which no Doctor Finucane could make any
possible approach. And Mr. Townsend came also, let us hope not in
vain; though the cure which he fain would have perfected can hardly
be effected in such moments as those. Let us hope that it had been
already effected. The only crying sin which we can lay to the charge
of the dying man is that of which we have spoken; he had endeavoured
by pensioning falsehood and fraud to preserve for his wife her name,
and for his son that son's inheritance. Even over this, deep as it
was, the recording angel may have dropped some cleansing te