us as we was sitting over our tea between the lights, looking as white
as a ghost. I gave a shriek when I saw him, for I was regular scared
out of my senses. "Robert's ghost!" I cried; but it was Robert himself,
come home to us to die. And he's lying upstairs now, with so little life
in him that I expect every breath to be his last.'

'What is his complaint?'

'Apathy, my lady. Dear, dear, that's not it. I never do remember the
doctor's foreign names.'

'Atrophy,' perhaps.

'Yes, my lady, that was it. Happen such crack-jaw words come easy to a
scholar like your ladyship.'

'Does the doctor give no hope?'

'Well, no, my lady. He don't go so far as to say there's no hope, though
Robert has been badly so long. It all depends, he says, upon the
rallying power of the constitution. The lungs are not gone, and the
heart is not diseased. If there's rallying power, Robert will come
round, and if there isn't he'll sink. But the doctor says nature will
have to make an effort. But I have my own idea about the case,' added
the landlady, with a sigh.

'What is your idea?'

'That our Robert was marked for death when he came into this house, and
that he meant what he said when he spoke of coming home to die. Things