rame is
at rest. Look on her, and perhaps only the physician's eye could
distinguish her state from death. It is not sleep, it is not trance, it
is not the dooming coma from which there is no awaking. Shall I call it
by the name received in our schools? Is it the catalepsy in which life
is suspended, but consciousness acute? She is motionless, rigid; it
is but with a strain of my own sense that I know that the breath still
breathes, and the heart still beats. But I am convinced that though she
can neither speak, nor stir, nor give sign, she is fully, sensitively
conscious of all that passes around her. She is like those who have seen
the very coffin carried into their chamber, and been unable to cry
out, 'Do not bury me alive!' Judge then for yourself, with this intense
consciousness and this impotence to evince it, what might be the effect
of your presence,--first an agony of despair, and then the complete
extinction of life!"

"I have known but one such case,--a mother whose heart was wrapped up in
a suffering infant. She had lain for two days and two nights, still, as
if in her shroud. All save myself said, 'Life is gone.' I said, 'Life
still is there.' They brought in the infant, to try what effect its
presence would produce; then her lips moved, and the hands crossed upon
her bosom trembled."

"And the result?" exclaimed Faber, eagerly. "If the result of your
experience sanction your presence, come; the sight of the babe rekindled
life?"

"No; extinguished its last spark! I will not enter Lilian's room. I will
go away,--away from the house itself. That acute consciousness! I know
it well! She may even hear me move in the room below, hear me speak at
this moment. Go back to her, go back! But if hers be the state which I
have known in another, which may be yet more familiar to persons of far
ampler experience than mine, there is no immediate danger of death. The
state will last through to-day, through to-night, perhaps for days to
come. Is it so?"

"I believe that for at least twelve hours there will be no change in her
state. I believe also that if she recover from it, calm and refreshed,
as from a sleep, the danger of death will have passed away."

"And for twelve hours my presence would be hurtful?"

"Rather say fatal, if my diagnosis be right."

I wrung my friend's hand, and we parted.

Oh, to lose her now!--now that her love and her reason had both
returned, each more vivid than before! Futile, indeed,