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214 bending over the bed, and laying her hand gently on her shoulder.

"He says I ought to go to the South! And I can't—I can't—I won't leave him. If I am as ill as that, I had better die here. He—he has made so many sacrifices for me already. Think of the expense! And to be parted from him, and all alone! No! I won't leave him. He is all I have in the world—I won't leave him!"

"You are exciting yourself needlessly, dear," said Elizabeth after an interval, which was filled by Hatty's racking cough. "The doctor will not pronounce decidedly till he sees you again. When he does so, it will be time enough to talk of what we will or will not do."

"We?" The girl turned her white tear-stained face, and fixed her prominent short-sighted eyes on her friend.

"Yes—we. If you had to go away for a time, I should accompany you. I would not let you go alone."

"What! and throw up your classes, and everything? Oh, Lizzie! I couldn't let you do that."

"We won't talk about it, then, till the time comes. Perhaps it never may come. Now I am going out to get the prescription he left made up for you."

When she quitted the apothecary's half an hour later, she walked on the quay, going towards the Champs de Mars. In her black dress, with a thick veil, she was not likely to attract attention, and she wanted to be alone; she had no heart to return to Monsieur D's class that day. It was astonishing how attached she had grown to this American girl in the short space of three months. Nothing but this would have made her decide, on the spur