iew of the patient,
from whom she was half cut off by a curtain at the foot of the bed. A
sort of dread, however, made Mary gaze at everything around her before
she brought her eyes upon him--her father's watch on the table,
indicating ten minutes to four, the Minster Tower in the rising
sunlight--nay, the very furniture of the room, and Dr. May's position,
before she durst familiarize herself with Leonard's appearance--he whom
she had last seen as a sturdy, ruddy, healthful boy, looking able to
outweigh two of his friend Aubrey.

The original disease had long since passed into typhus, and the scarlet
eruption was gone, so that she only saw a yellow whiteness, that,
marked by the blue veins of the bared temples, was to her mind
death-like. Mary had not been sheltered from taking part in scenes of
suffering; she had seen sickness and death in cottages, as well as in
her own home, and she had none of the fanciful alarms, either of
novelty or imagination, to startle her in the strange watch that had so
suddenly been thrust on her but what did fill her with a certain
apprehension, was the new and lofty beauty of expression that sat on
that sleeping countenance. 'A nice boy,' 'rather a handsome lad,' 'a
boy of ingenuous face,' they had always called Leonard Ward, when
animated with health and spirits; and the friendship between him and
Aubrey had been encouraged, but without thinking of him as more than an
ordinary lad of good style. Now, however, to Mary's mind, the broad
brow and wasted features in their rest had assumed a calm nobility that
was like those of Ethel's favourite champions--those who conquered by
'suffering and being strong.' She looked and listened for the low
regular breath, almost doubting at one moment whether it still were
drawn, then only reassured by its freedom and absence from effort, that
it was not soon to pass away. There was something in that look as if
death must set his seal on it, rather than as if it could return to the
flush of health, and the struggle and strife of school-boy life and of
manhood.

More than an hour had passed, and all within the house was as still as
ever; and through the window there only came such sounds as seem like
audible silence--the twittering of birds, the humming of bees, the
calls of boys in distant fields, the far-away sound of
waggon-wheels--when there was a slight move, and Mary, in the tension
of all her faculties, had well-nigh started, but restrained