“Is dying,” repeated Lightwood, with emotion, “at some distance from here. He is sinking under injuries received at the hands of a villain who attacked him in the dark. I come straight from his bedside. He is almost always insensible. In a short restless interval of sensibility, or partial sensibility, I made out that he asked for you to be brought to sit by him. Hardly relying on my own interpretation of the indistinct sounds he made, I caused Lizzie to hear them. We were both sure that he asked for you.”

The dressmaker, with her hands still clasped, looked affrightedly from the one to the other of her two companions.

“If you delay, he may die with his request ungratified, with his last wish⁠—entrusted to me⁠—we have long been much more than brothers⁠—unfulfilled. I shall break down, if I try to say more.”

In a few moments the black bonnet and the crutch-stick were on duty, the good Jew was left in possession of the house, and the dolls’ dressmaker, side by side in a chaise with Mortimer Lightwood, was posting out of town.