ately afterwards, very much
agitated. She kissed Beth, and from that moment the child was calm;
but there settled upon her pathetic little face a terrible look of age
and anxiety.

When she was dressed, she ran right into her father's room before any
one could stop her. He was moaning--"O my head, my head! O my head, my
head!" over and over again.

"You mustn't stay here, little woman--not to-day," the doctor said.
"It will make your father worse if you do."

Beth stole from the room, and returned to the nursery. There, however,
she could still hear her father moaning, and she could not bear it, so
she took her prayer-book, by way of life-saving apparatus, and went
down to the kitchen to "see" what the servants were thinking--her own
significant expression. They were all strangely subdued. "Sit down,
Miss Beth," Biddy said kindly. "Sit down in the window there wid your
book if you want company. It's a sore heart you'll be having, or I'm
much mistaken."

Beth sat in the window the whole morning, reading prayers to herself,
while she watched and waited. The doctor sent Riley down from the
sick-room several times to fetch things, and each time Beth consulted
his countenance anxiously for news, but asked no questions. Biddy
tried to persuade her to eat, but the child could not touch anything.

Late in the afternoon Riley came down in a hurry.

"Is the master better, Pat?" Biddy demanded.

"'Deed, thin, he isn't," Riley replied; "and the doctor's sending me
off on the horse as hard as I can go for Dr. Jamieson."

"Och, thin, if the doctor's sending you for Dr. Jamieson it's all up.
He's niver sent for till the last. The Lord himself won't save him
now."

Beth shuffled over the leaves of her prayer-book hurriedly. She had
been crying piteously to God in her heart for hours to save her
father, and He had not heard; now she remembered that the servants
said if you read the Lord's Prayer backwards it would raise the devil.
Beth tried; but the invocation was unavailing. Before Riley could
saddle the horse, a message was sent down to stop him; and then Anne
came for Beth, and took her up to her father's room. The dreadful
sounds had ceased at last, and there was a strange silence in the
house. Mrs. Caldwell was sitting beside her husband's bed, rocking
herself a little as if in pain, but shedding no tears. Mildred was
standing with her arm round her mother's neck crying bitterly, while
Baby Bernadine gazed at her fathe