“I wish we were confirmed,” said Fred, sighing, and presently adding, “My Prayer-Book, if you please, Henrietta.”

“You will only make your head worse, with trying to read the small print,” said she; “I will read anything you want to you.”

He chose nevertheless to have it himself, and when he next spoke, it was to say, “I wish, when Mr. Franklin leaves her, you would ask him to come to me.”

Henrietta did not like the proposal at all, and said all she could against it; but Fred persisted, and made her at last undertake to ask Aunt Geoffrey’s consent.  Even then she would have done her best to miss the opportunity; but Fred heard the first sounds, and she was obliged to fetch Mr. Franklin.  The conference was not long, and she found no reason to regret that it had taken place; for Fred did not seem so much oppressed and weighted down when she again returned to him.

The physician who had been sent for arrived.  He had seen Mrs. Frederick Langford some years before, and well understood her case, and his opinion was now exactly what Fred had been prepared by his uncle to expect.  It was impossible to conjecture how long she might yet survive:  another attack might come at any moment, and be the last.  It might be deferred for weeks or months, or even now it was possible that she might rally, and return to her usual state of health.

It was on this possibility, or as she chose to hear the word, probability, that Henrietta fixed her whole mind.  The rest was to her as if unsaid; she would not hear nor believe it, and shunned anything that brought the least impression of the kind.  The only occasion when she would avow her fears even to herself, was when she knelt in prayer; and then how wild and unsubmissive were her petitions!  How embittered and wretched she would feel at her own powerlessness!  Then the next minute she would drive off her fears as by force; call up a vision of a brightly smiling future; think, speak, and act as if hiding her eyes would prevent the approach of the enemy she dreaded.

Her grandmamma was as determined as herself to hope; and her grandpapa, though fully alive to the real state of the case, could not bear to sadden her before the time, and let her talk on and build schemes for the future, till he himself almost caught a glance of her hopes, and his deep sigh was the only warning she received from him.  Fred, too weak for much argument, and not unwilling to rejoice now and then in an illusion, was easily silenced, and Aunt Geoffrey had no time for anyone but the patient.  Her whole thought, almost her whole being, was devoted to “Mary,” the friend, the sister of her childhood, whom she now attended upon with something of the reverent devotedness with which an angel might be watched and served, were it to make a brief sojourn upon earth; feeling it a privilege each day that she was still permitted to attend her, and watching for each passing word and expression as a treasure to be dwelt on in many a subsequent year.