in a
distant hum. It is quiet now, very quiet. Harry has awakened once from
his slumbers, asked to be moved nearer the front of the bed, that they
may be very near each other while he sleeps again, and, when that was
done, has smiled lovingly upon the little, sorrowful watcher, and, with
his wasted hand tightly clasped in his, has fallen into sounder
slumbers. In the deathlike stillness which has fallen on the room, she
can hear his breathing, and has ventured twice or thrice, while he slept
thus, to steal softly to the bedside and look upon his face; but as at
each successive attempt he has seemed almost immediately to feel the
dreaded atmosphere, and his slumbers have become broken and uneasy, with
a heavy heart she has crept silently back again. Charley has waited
until the thin hand of the sick child has relaxed its clasp on his own,
then, moved by a loving impulse, noiselessly busies himself in removing
a littered mass of vials, cups, and glasses, which have accumulated on
the stand near the bed, to a table just at hand, and taxes his childish
ingenuity in arranging thereon, in the prettiest possible form, a
multitude of toys and trinkets, gifts sent by the servants of the house
to his brother, putting the new ones in front, so that his eye may fall
on them first when he wakes again. This done, he creeps back to his seat
by the bedside, and silently watches his slumbers as before.

A ray of sunlight, bright and warm, creeps through the lattice and falls
on the veined lids; the eyes open, and instinctively moving from the too
dazzling light, rest placidly on a fragment of blue sky just visible
through the half-closed window. With eyes fixed intently on that hazy
distance, moment after moment, silent and motionless he lies, and the
blue orbs grow lustrous as he gazes with the mystic beauty of eyes whose
inner vision rests on unutterable things, and gradually there comes upon
the little face the look that never comes on any face but once. Oh,
mystic change! Oh, strange solemnity of death! The little watcher by the
bedside, face to face with its mysterious presence for the first time,
ignorant of its processes, feels a dread, half-defined idea of what it
may be, and, with a piteous effort to recall his dying brother back to
his old look and seeming, tremulously falters:

'See all the nice things they've sent you, Harry, all the pretty toys
you've got! Here they are, spread out upon the table. Look, brother,
look!'