His wife and daughter were always with him, relieving each other in
turn, and occasionally both yielding place to one of the many
faithful servants, who were all eager to do what they could for the
master they loved; but in his waking hours the squire seldom missed
the best-loved faces about him. Rachel and her mother seemed to
live their lives about his sick bed, soothing his weariness and
pain, and striving with patient resignation to school themselves to
submission to the will of God, who was about to take their loved
one from them.
And yet they had kept him with them longer than once seemed
possible. The bright days of summer were doubtless favourable to
the patient. When he could lie with open windows, breathing the
pure soft air from woodland and field, he seemed able to make a
stand against the grim enemy of human nature. But the summer was
now upon the wane; the golden sunshine was obscured by the first
driving rains of the approaching equinox; and it seemed to those
who watched at the sufferer's bedside that his life was ebbing away
as slowly and as steadily as the hours of sunshine in the
shortening day.
Today there was a look upon his face which caused Rachel many times
to turn anxious and beseeching eyes upon her mother, and yet what
she read in the expression of that worn and gentle countenance only
confirmed her own impressions.
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