Mr. Grey bent his head reverentially over the sacred volume and kissed it devoutly.
"Kiss the Book, my child. Take it in your own right hand and kiss it. It is the history of the life and sufferings and death of our Lord, and something of great moment is conducting."
"Kiss the Book, you also," looking towards Mrs. Grant.
She did as he desired.
"Now, my daughter, and you, Henry Grey, both together hold that Book, which is the history of the life and sufferings and death of our Lord, to my lips, for I am weak and unable, and I will kiss it last of all."
They placed the Book against his lips, and when he had kissed it they drew it back, and placed the Testament on the bed.
Mr. Grey folded his arms tightly across his chest; he had a feeling that his chest would burst if he did not shout out and relieve it.
"My daughter," said the sick man, "if I should never get off this bed again—and I feel that something great is conducting—when I am dead you will look to him for all advice and guidance. He will be your friend, your only friend, who can be of aid to you when I am dead. You will lean upon him. He will guard your money and see that no one does you ill or cheats you. He is an honest man, Maud. He has taken care of your fortune for me until now; he will take care of it for you when I am dead. You will have no one else but him; no friend in all the world but Henry Grey."
"Oh, my God!" burst from the banker. If the hangman were in the room, and any word spoken by him, Grey, was to be the signal for his death, he could not restrain himself.
For a moment they all three looked at him in grave surprise. His words were not perhaps improper to the grave occasion, but his manner of uttering them had something startling in it. There was in his tone a cry of wild appeal against an inexorable decree of prodigious woe. His voice had more the sound of a brute's inarticulate cry of despair than any human agony fitted to human words. It was a death-cry, the death-cry of some fine instinct of the human soul. It was a cry the like of which no man utters twice in a lifetime.