MRS. FULLERTON’S illness proved even more serious than the doctor had expected. She asked so incessantly for her daughters, especially Hadria, that all question of difference between her and Hubert was laid aside, by tacit consent, and the sisters took their place at their mother’s bedside. The doctor said that the patient must have been suffering, for many years, from an exhausted state of the nerves and from some kind of trouble. Had she had any great disappointment or anxiety?

Hadria and Algitha glanced at one another. “Yes,” said Algitha, “my mother has had a lot of troublesome children to worry and disappoint her.”

“Ah!” exclaimed the doctor, nodding his head. “Well, now has come a crisis in Mrs. Fullerton’s condition. This illness has been incubating for years. She must have undergone mental misery of a very acute kind, whether or not the cause may have been adequate. If her children desire to keep her among them, it will be necessary to treat her with the utmost care, and to oppose her in nothing. Further disappointment or chagrin, she has no longer the power to stand. There are complications. Her heart will give trouble, and all your vigilance and forbearance are called for, to avoid serious consequences. I think it right to speak frankly, for everything depends—and always hereafter will depend—on the patient’s being saved as much as possible from the repetition of any former annoyance or sorrow. At best, there will be much for her to endure; I dread an uprooting of long familiar habits for any one of her age. Her life, if not her reason, are in her children’s hands.”

A time of terrible anxiety followed, for the inmates of the Red House. The doctor insisted on a trained nurse. Algitha and Hadria felt uneasy when they were away, even for a moment, from the sick-room, but the doctor reminded them of the necessity, for the patient’s sake as well as their own, of keeping up their strength. He warned them that there would be a long strain upon them, and that any lack of common sense, as regards their own health, would certainly diminish the patient’s chances of recovery. Nobody had his clearest judgment and his quickest observation at command, when nervously exhausted. Everything might depend on a moment’s decision, a moment’s swiftness of insight. The warning was not thrown away, but both sisters found the incessant precautions trying.

Every thought, every emotion was swallowed up in the one awful anxiety.

“Oh, Hadria, I feel as if this were my fault,” cried Algitha, on one still, ominous night, after she had resigned her post at the bedside to the nurse, who was to fill it for a couple of hours, after which Hadria took her turn of watching.

“You? It was I,” said Hadria, with trembling lips.

“Mother has never been strong,” Algitha went on. “And my leaving home was the beginning of all this trouble.”

“And my leaving home the end of it,” her sister added.

Algitha was walking restlessly to and fro.

“And I went to Dunaghee so often, so often,” she cried tearfully, “so that mother should not feel deserted, and you too came, and the boys when they could. But she never got over my leaving; she seemed to resent my independence, my habit of judging for myself; she hated every detail in which I differed from the girls she knew. If I had married and gone to the Antipodes, she would have been quite satisfied, but——”

“Ah, why do people need human souls for their daily food?” cried Hadria mournfully. She flung open the window of the bedroom, and looked out over the deadly stillness of the fields and the heavy darkness. “But they do need them,” she said, in the same quiet, hopeless tone, “and the souls have got to be provided.”

“What is the time?” asked Algitha. A clock had struck, outside. “Could it be the clock of Craddock church? The sound must have stolen down hill, through the still air.”

“It struck three.”

“You ought to get some sleep,” cried Algitha. “Remember what the doctor said.”

“I feel so nervous, so anxious. I could not sleep.”

“Just for a few minutes,” Algitha urged. Hadria consented at last, to go into her room, which adjoined her sister’s, and lie down on the bed. The door was open between the rooms. “You must do the same,” she stipulated.

There was silence for some minutes, but the silence swarmed with the ghosts of voices. The air seemed thick with shapes, and terrors, and strange warnings.

The doctor had not disguised the fact that the patient was fighting hard for life, and that it was impossible to predict the result. Everything depended on whether her strength would hold out. The weakness of the heart was an unfortunate element in the case. To save strength and give plentiful nourishment, without heightening the fever, must be the constant effort. Algitha’s experience stood her in good stead. Her practical ability had been quickened and disciplined by her work. She had trained herself in nursing, among other things.

Hadria’s experience was small. She had to summon her intelligence to the rescue. The Fullerton stock had never been deficient in this particular. In difficult moments, when rule and tradition had done their utmost, Hadria had often some original device to suggest, to fit the individual case, which tided them over a crisis, or avoided some threatening predicament.

“Are you sleeping?” asked Algitha, very softly.

“No,” said Hadria; “I feel very uneasy to-night. I think I will go down.”

“Do try to get a little rest first, Hadria; your watch is next, and you must not go to it fagged out.”

“I know, but I feel full of dread. I must just go and see that all is right.”

“Then I will come too,” said Algitha.

They stole down stairs together, in the dim light of the oil lamps that were kept burning all night. The clock struck the half-hour as they passed along the landing. A strange fancy came to Hadria, that a dusky figure drifted away before her, as she advanced. It seemed as though death had receded at her approach. The old childish love for her mother had revived in all its force, during this long fight with the reaper of souls. She felt all her energies strung with the tension of battle. She fought against a dark horror that she could not face. Knowing, and realising vividly, that if her mother lived, her own dreams were ended for ever, she wrestled with desperate strength for the life that was at stake. Her father’s silent wretchedness was terrible to see. He would not hear a word of doubt as to the patient’s recovery. He grew angry if anyone hinted at danger. He insisted that his wife was better each day. She would soon be up and well again.

“Never well again,” the doctor had confided to Hubert, “though she may possibly pull through.”

Mr. Fullerton’s extravagant hopefulness sent a thrill along the nerves. It was as if he had uttered the blackest forebodings. The present crisis had stirred a thousand feelings and associations, in Hadria, which had long been slumbering. She seemed to be sent back again, to the days of her childhood. The intervening years were blotted out. She realized now, with agonising vividness, the sadness of her mother’s life, the long stagnation, the slow decay of disused faculties, and the ache that accompanies all processes of decay, physical or moral. Not only the strong appeal of old affection, entwined with the earliest associations, was at work, but the appeal of womanhood itself:—the grey sad story of a woman’s life, bare and dumb and pathetic in its irony and pain: the injury from without, and then the self-injury, its direct offspring; unnecessary, yet inevitable; the unconscious thirst for the sacrifice of others, the hungry claims of a nature unfulfilled, the groping instinct to bring the balance of renunciation to the level, and indemnify oneself for the loss suffered and the spirit offered up. And that propitiation had to be made. It was as inevitable as that the doom of Orestes should follow the original crime of the house of Atreus. Hadria’s whole thought and strength were now centred on the effort to bring about that propitiation, in her own person. She prepared the altar and sharpened the knife. In that subtle and ironical fashion, her fate was steadily at work.

The sick-room was very still when the sisters entered. It was both warm and fresh. A night-light burnt on the table, where cups and bottles were ranged, a spirit-lamp and kettle, and other necessaries. The night-light threw long, stealthy shadows over the room. The fire burnt with a red glow. The bed lay against the long wall. As the two figures entered, there was a faint sound of quick panting, and a moan. Hadria rushed to the bedside.

“Quick, quick, some brandy,” she called. Algitha flew to the table for the brandy, noticing with horror, as she passed, that the nurse had fallen asleep at her post. Algitha shook her hastily.

“Go and call Mr. Fullerton,” she said sharply, “and quick, quick.” The patient was sinking. The nurse vanished. Algitha had handed the cup of brandy to Hadria. The sisters stood by the bedside, scarcely daring to breathe. Mr. Fullerton entered hurriedly, with face pallid and drawn.

“What is it? Is she——?”

“No, no; I hope not. Another moment it would have been too late, but I think we were in time.”

Hadria had administered the brandy, and stood watching breathlessly, for signs of revival. She gave one questioning glance at Algitha. Her trust in the nurse was gone. Algitha signed hope. The patient’s breathing was easier.

“I wonder if we ought to give a little more?” Hadria whispered.

“Wait a minute. Ah! don’t speak to her, father; she needs all her strength.”

The ticking of the clock could be heard, in the dim light.

Algitha was holding her mother’s wrist. “Stronger,” she said. Hadria drew a deep sigh. “We must give food presently. No more brandy.”

“She’s all right again, all right again!” cried Mr. Fullerton, eagerly.

The nurse went to prepare the extract which the doctor had ordered for the patient, when quickly-digested nourishment was required. It gave immediate strength. The brandy had stimulated the sinking organs to a saving effort; the food sustained the system at the level thus achieved. The perilous moment was over.

“Thank heaven!” cried Algitha, when the patient’s safety was assured, and she sank back on the pillow, with a look of relief on her worn face.

“If it had not been for you, Hadria——. What’s the matter? Are you ill?”

Algitha rushed forward, and the nurse dragged up a chair.

Hadria had turned deadly white, and her hand groped for support.

She drew herself together with a desperate effort, and sat down breathing quickly. “I am not going to faint,” she said, reassuringly. “It was only for a moment.” She gave a shudder. “What a fight it was! We were only just in time——”

A low voice came from the bed. The patient was talking in her sleep. “Tell Hadria to come home if she does not want to kill me. Tell her to come home; it is her duty. I want her.”

Then, after a pause, “I have always done my duty,—I have sacrificed myself for the children. Why do they desert me, why do they desert me?” And then came a low moaning cry, terrible to hear. The sisters were by the bedside, in a moment. Their father stood behind them.

“We are here, mother dear; we are here watching by you,” Hadria murmured, with trembling voice.

Algitha touched the thin hand, quietly. “We are with you, mother,” she repeated. “Don’t you know that we have been with you for a long time?”

The sick woman seemed to be soothed by the words.

“Both here, both?” she muttered vaguely. And then a smile spread over the sharpened features; she opened her eyes and looked wistfully at the two faces bending over her.

A look of happiness came into her dimmed eyes.

“My girls,” she said in a dreamy voice, “my girls have come back to me—I knew they were good girls——”

Then her eyes closed, and she fell into a profound and peaceful slumber.