one. As she returned
to the sick-room and slipped back into the chair which Catherine
quitted, the image of Hazard faded from her mind, and the idea that he
could help her, except by his sympathy and friendship, never entered it.
After a time her father opened his eyes again and looked at her. She
bent over him, and he whispered: "Give me your hand!" She took his hand,
and for some time he lay with his eyes open, as though watching her. She
could only wonder what was in his mind; perhaps disconnected dreams with
intervals of partial consciousness, as now, followed by more vague
visions and hurrying phantasms; but she imagined that he had meant not
so much to ask for the strength of her hand as to give her die will and
courage of his own, and she felt only the wish that he might not doubt
her answer to the call. Although he soon dozed again, she did not alter
her position, but sat hour after hour, only making way for the nurse
who came to give him stimulants which had less and less effect. Her
watch ended at two o'clock, when she sent Catherine to bed, but remained
herself until the gray dawn had passed and the sun was high in the
heavens. She meant her father to know, as long as he knew any thing,
that her hand was in his. Not until the doctor assured her that he was
no longer conscious, did her long walk into the shadow of death at last
end. When Mrs. Murray came, she found Esther still there, her face paler
than ever, with dark rings round her eyes, and looking worn and old. As
she spoke, her eyes constantly filled with tears, and her nerves were
strung up to a tension which made her aunt promptly intervene and insist
on her taking rest. Esther obeyed like a worn-out child.

So died William Dudley, and was buried under the ice and snow of winter,
while his daughter went on alone to meet the buffets of life. It was in
the first days of February that Esther looked about her and seemed to
feel that the world had changed. She said to herself that youth was
gone. What was she to do with middle-life? At twenty-six to be alone,
with no one to interpose as much as a shadow across her path, was a
strange sensation; it made her dizzy, as though she were a solitary bird
flying through mid-air, and as she looked ahead on her aerial path,
could see no tie more human than that which bound her to Andromeda and
Orion.

To this moral strain was added the reaction from physical fatigue. For a
week or two after her father's death, Est