very thoughts. He has seen your trouble, and wished He could help
you—why He can not I am not able to tell you; but it will all be
well.

"Let me say one prayer with you." And he began in his low quiet
voice. The woman knelt down beside him, shaken with sobbing. Till, at
the words "Suffer us not, for any pains of death, to fall from thee,"
poor George put out his old withered hand and took Arthur's, and
smiled through his pain—"the first time he ever smiled since his
illness began," his wife told us after his death, "and he smiled
many times after that."

He did not speak to us again; the effort had been too great. The
woman accompanied us down-stairs, showing, in her troubled officious
hurry to anticipate Arthur's wishes, and the way in which she hung
about the gate as we rode out, what it had been to her.

We rode home almost in silence. Arthur, as we got near to the lodge,
turned to me, and said, half apologetically, "We must speak to simple
people in the language that they can understand. Fortunately, there
is one language we can all understand."




CHAPTER IX


It was a hot summer, and Arthur a little overtasked his strength.
London, and a London season, is far more tiring than far greater