the wild adventurers who gather to gold as the vultures of prey round a
carcass; my servants would desert me, my very flocks would be
shepherdless!

Months again rolled on months. I had just approached the close of my
beloved Work, when it was again suspended, and by an anguish keener than
all which I had previously known.

Lilian became alarmingly ill. Her state of health, long gradually
declining, had hitherto admitted checkered intervals of improvement, and
exhibited no symptoms of actual danger. But now she was seized with a
kind of chronic fever, attended with absolute privation of sleep, an
aversion to even the lightest nourishment, and an acute nervous
susceptibility to all the outward impressions of which she had long seemed
so unconscious; morbidly alive to the faintest sound, shrinking from the
light as from a torture. Her previous impatience at my entrance into her
room became aggravated into vehement emotions, convulsive paroxysms of
distress; so that Faber banished me from her chamber, and, with a heart
bleeding at every fibre, I submitted to the cruel sentence.

Faber had taken up his abode in my house and brought Amy with him; one or
the other never left Lilian, night or day. The great physician spoke
doubtfully of the case, but not despairingly.

"Remember," he said, "that in spite of the want of sleep, the abstinence
from food, the form has not wasted as it would do were this fever
inevitably mortal. It is upon that phenomenon I build a hope that I have
not been mistaken in the opinion I hazarded from the first. We are now in
the midst of the critical struggle between life and reason; if she
preserve the one, my conviction is that she will regain the other. That