"Can it be Dame Newbolt?" she thought. The closed eyes were sunk in the sockets; the features stood out sharp and hard, yellow as parchment; the hair, parted on the forehead, was thin and snowy white; and the hands, which rested on the coverlet, were like the hands of a skeleton.
"Oh, Ann," exclaimed Patience, "how could you let her get into this condition?"
"How could I help it?" said the girl, bursting into tears. "I have watched over her, I have fed her, I have stood outside the prison gates waiting, always waiting, but she has paid no heed to me. Had it not been for my Lord Craven I should have had no food to give her, for she would spare me no money. I have known her go for days, eating nothing but a crust of bread. More than once the jailers have brought her here, carrying her in their arms. It was of no use, on the morrow she was up and about, and with them again; even as you see her she has still great strength."
"It is wonderful," said Patience.
Though they were speaking loudly, Mistress Newbolt did not hear them. She did not move; indeed, one could hardly hear her breathe.
"She will sleep like that for twelve hours at least," said Ann, "longer perhaps; then she will wake up and eat what I shall have prepared for her; then she will go back to the prison, and I shall not see her again for perhaps twenty-four hours, when I shall bring her home, or one of the warders will. It is a terrible life, so terrible, I wonder how she lives at all."
"And you, you poor thing?" said Patience, taking Ann's hand in hers, then stooping over the sleeper she added, "She will die."
"No, she will not," answered Ann. "Good Doctor Bohurst, whom Lord Craven sent to visit her, says she will not die, that she has more vitality than many a younger woman, and that these long sleeps restore her completely, only I have to feed her. See," she continued, and going to a table she took up a bottle, poured a little of the contents into a spoon, and held it to her mother's lips.
Without waking, she just sucked it down like a child.
"There," said Ann, "in two hours I shall give it her again, and so on until she wakes. Then she will eat and drink. It is a wondrous life."