3. SEVEN O'CLOCK P.M.Soft as was Cytherea's motion along the corridors of Knapwater
House, the preternaturally keen intelligence of the suffering woman
caught the maiden's well-known footfall. She entered the
sick-chamber with suspended breath.
In the room everything was so still, and sensation was as it
were so rarefied by solicitude, that thinking seemed acting, and
the lady's weak act of trying to live a silent wrestling with all
the powers of the universe. Nobody was present but Mr. Raunham, the
nurse having left the room on Cytherea's entry, and the physician
and surgeon being engaged in a whispered conversation in a
side-chamber. Their patient had been pronounced out of danger.
Cytherea went to the bedside, and was instantly recognized. O,
what a change—Miss Aldclyffe dep
