Marion listened with a look of grave and melancholy surprise; while Agnes, trying not to seem aware of it, and evidently anxious to avoid any reply, fixed her eyes on the door, as if impatient to proceed, and continued, in rapid accents of assumed bravado—
"You are looking really ill, Marion, and must have got a dreadful fright! It would have killed me altogether! But make your mind easy, for these attacks are, I am told, very common. The Duke of Middlesex had ten or twelve, and people live often for years after the first, which is a great comfort."
"They do sometimes, but not always," replied Marion, with mournful gravity. "My dear Agnes, do not be too sanguine. This is a very serious attack. You may hope, but I cannot; for it seems to me that our uncle is laid on a bed from which he will never rise again."
"Oh! you are nervous, after being so frightfully alarmed this morning. It must have been very shocking," said Agnes, shaking her well-arranged ringlets, and attempting to get up a melancholy look; but in her mind there never was any of that gentle, feminine apprehensiveness for others, which is so amiable and so endearing. "I feel quite confident that in a few days he will recover; but for the present, Marion, you see everything through a darkened glass. I have no fears whatever," added she, in a tone of superior wisdom. "Old people always remind me of a creaking door, forever complaining, but never any worse! It is lucky for those who have nerves to endure it all. I have none; therefore being of no earthly use here, I should be quite in the way. Indeed, a single week of moping at home, with fright and anxiety, would lay me up also."
"You are not going, Agnes? Impossible! Listen to me for five minutes."
"I am not equal to the exertion! What can I do? It is out of the question to break off my engagement now! I am really between the horns of a dilemma, and must be tossed upon one or other of them. Both Mrs. O'Donoghoe and Lord Doncaster have set their hearts upon having me; and, as the schoolboys say in their speeches, 'It must be so! Agnes, thou reason'st well!'"
"If we are sisters, hear me," replied Marion, in accents of breathless indignation. "Agnes! you cannot, you must not think of going."
"But, as the lover says in the Critic, 'I can, I must, I will, I ought, I do!' Marion, you do not know the importance I attach to my excursion, which will last only a few days. As for this absurd affair of Sir Arthur's, you think every breeze a hurricane; but it is well over now, and, since he is ordered quietness, he will miss me the less, or perhaps not at all, if you never mention my absence. Certainly my forte is not in a sick-room, and yours is. My chief fault, as an attendant on sick people, is, that I am good for nothing. As for danger, Marion, I do not see any."
"Or, rather, you will not see any. Agnes, I would not for ten thousand worlds leave him now. Our best—almost our only friend, and probably dying," exclaimed Marion, while hot, scalding tears rushed in torrents from her eyes. "The question now is not, whether Sir Arthur will be restored as he was to us? but only, how many days or hours he can be kept from the grave. Every passing moment is a knell of death to my heart, when I think how few more we shall see before he is gone forever. If you consider nothing but mere appearances, Agnes, you ought to stay."
"As for appearances," replied she, clasping her bracelet, "I am of opinion with the Abbe Mordaunt on that point, as on most others, that those who study appearances have seldom any realities to boast of."