'Ah! we all have our trials, rich and poor,' sighed the woman, who desired nothing better than to be allowed to unbosom her woes to the grand looking lady in the fur-bordered cloth pelisse, with beautiful dark hair piled up in clustering masses above a broad white forehead, and slender white hands on which diamonds flashed and glittered in the firelight, an unaccustomed figure by that rustic hearth.
'We all have our trials—high and low.'
'That reminds me,' said Lady Maulevrier, looking up at her, 'your husband said you were in trouble. What did that mean?'
'Sickness in the house, my lady. A brother of mine that went to America to make his fortune, and seemed to be doing so well for the first five or six years, and wrote home such beautiful letters, and then left off writing all at once, and we made sure as he was dead, and never got a word from him for ten years, and just three weeks ago he drops in upon us as we was sitting over our tea between the lights, looking as white as a ghost. I gave a shriek when I saw him, for I was regular scared out of my senses. "Robert's ghost!" I cried; but it was Robert himself, come home to us to die. And he's lying upstairs now, with so little life in him that I expect every breath to be his last.'
'What is his complaint?'
'Apathy, my lady. Dear, dear, that's not it. I never do remember the doctor's foreign names.'
'Atrophy,' perhaps.
'Yes, my lady, that was it. Happen such crack-jaw words come easy to a scholar like your ladyship.'
'Does the doctor give no hope?'
'Well, no, my lady. He don't go so far as to say there's no hope, though Robert has been badly so long. It all depends, he says, upon the rallying power of the constitution. The lungs are not gone, and the heart is not diseased. If there's rallying power, Robert will come round, and if there isn't he'll sink. But the doctor says nature will have to make an effort. But I have my own idea about the case,' added the landlady, with a sigh.