ole business of her life. Her bed was placed close
by the door which opened into his chamber, and she was alive at the
slightest noise or disturbance from the couch of the querulous invalid.
Though, to do him justice, he lay awake many an hour, silent and
without stirring, unwilling to awaken his kind and vigilant nurse.

He loved his daughter with more fondness now, perhaps, than ever he had
done since the days of her childhood. In the discharge of gentle
offices and kind filial duties, this simple creature shone most
especially. "She walks into the room as silently as a sunbeam," Mr.
Dobbin thought as he saw her passing in and out from her father's room,
a cheerful sweetness lighting up her face as she moved to and fro,
graceful and noiseless. When women are brooding over their children,
or busied in a sick-room, who has not seen in their faces those sweet
angelic beams of love and pity?

A secret feud of some years' standing was thus healed, and with a tacit
reconciliation. In these last hours, and touched by her love and
goodness, the old man forgot all his grief against her, and wrongs
which he and his wife had many a long night debated: how she had given
up everything for her boy; how she was careless of her parents in their
old age and misfortune, and only thought of the child; how absurdly and
foolishly, impiously indeed, she took on when George was removed from
her. Old Sedley forgot these charges as he was making up his last
account, and did justice to the gentle and uncomplaining little martyr.
One night when she stole into his room, she found him awake, when the
broken old man made his confession. "Oh, Emmy, I've been thinking we
were very unkind and unjust to you," he said and put out his cold and
feeble hand to her. She knelt down and prayed by his bedside, as he did
too, having still hold of her hand. When our turn comes, friend, may
we have such company in our prayers!

Perhaps as he was lying awake then, his life may have passed before
him--his early hopeful struggles, his manly successes and prosperity,
his downfall in his declining years, and his present helpless
condition--no chance of revenge against Fortune, which had had the
better of him--neither name nor money to bequeath--a spent-out,
bootless life of defeat and disappointment, and the end here! Which, I
wonder, brother reader, is the better lot, to die prosperous and
famous, or poor and disappointed? To have, and to be forced to yie