Richard Forrest, Bachelor — page 129: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

120 MARRIAGE AND DEATH. up her ceaseless vigil. ‘‘It is my duty. Consider if it were your father.’’ For two weeks the invalid lingered on, arousing hope in the breast of his watchers one day, only to crush it the next. Occasionally he rallied sufficiently to speak a word or two to those about him, but almost immediately a heavy stupor would overcome him, and he would lie motionless for hours, scarcely breathing. ‘“‘Tg there no chance for him to recover?’’ asked Gertrude, pathetically, one afternoon of the nurse in charge. | ‘“T cannot say that, Mrs. Eldridge,’’ was the reply. ‘‘We must always hope for the best. But——”’ At twilight the same day he passed away quietly, giving no sign that the end had come. At first, Gertrude refused to believe he was dead, and then, when at length she fully realized the blow which had fallen upon her, she was seized with the wildest hysterics. Nothing could calm her until, finally, in a state of utter exhausion, they put her to bed, where she lay too weak to move. The preparations for the funeral went on under the joint supervision of Arthur and Mrs. Dyking, but Gertrude could take no part in them. Shelay in adarkened room, in which no one spoke above a whisper while the funeral service was being read, only dimly comprehending what was go- ing on about her. ‘“You must get your wife away from here as soon as ever she can be moved,’’ stated the doctor to Arthur, a week after Mr. Clayton was laid in the family vault. ‘‘She will never regain her strength in this house. She must have complete change of air and scene. If she does not, I will not be responsible for her.”’ Gomichbooks co im