"Dear—dear! Very sad—very sad! And what did he die of? Consumption?"
"No—diphtheria."
"Ah! A very fatal complaint, my dear, especially among children. I have always had a great horror of it. In my younger days it used to be called sore throat, but I suppose it killed just as many people then as it does now that it has got a fine long Latin name. I suppose your poor brother suffered a great deal—didn't he, love?"
No answer, except a stifled sob, a rush from the room, and the sound of flying feet upon the hall's stone floor.
There are some things past human endurance; and to hear Jack's parting agonies—agonies whose memory she herself dare as yet hardly contemplate in her heart's low depths—lightly discussed by a gossiping old woman, is one of those things.
[CHAPTER XXXI.]
"Get me some fresh candles—long ones; longer than these—as long as you possibly can," Esther says that same evening, on going to bed, to the housemaid whom she finds putting coals on her fire.
"I think, 'm, that you will find these will last for to-night," the woman answers, looking at the very respectable dimensions of the unlit candles on Esther's queer old-fashioned toilet-table.