"Let me say my prayers first."
So she knelt down.
Beatrix Pendleton waited and watched for some time, for so long a time, at last, that she suspected Sybil had fallen asleep. She went and looked at her attentively, and then called her by name, and touched her, and so finally discovered that she had, in the midst of her prayers, relapsed into that fearful lethargy that was undermining her reason.
"Come, Sybil, dear, get into bed," said Beatrix, taking her hand and lifting her up.
"Yes," said the docile creature, and immediately did as her friend directed her.
There was no surer or sadder symptoms in Sybil's insanity, than the perfect docility of her who had once been so difficult to manage.
She went quietly to bed.
Beatrix prepared to follow her.
But Miss Pendleton was faint from long fasting. Neither she nor Sybil had tasted anything since their luncheon at two o'clock that day, when the court had taken a recess. They had reached the prison sometime after supper had been served; and in the awful crisis of Sybil's fate, no one had thought of food. Sybil did not seem to require it; she lay in a quiet lethargy, like death. But Beatrix was half-famished when she went to bed.
Her hunger, however, was soon forgotten in the great anxiety of her mind; and the sharpest point of it was this: