Page:Paul Clifford Vol 1.djvu/37

Rh haud passibus œquis, to the room of the sufferer; she stood with a bottle of medicine in her hand, shaking its contents up and down, and with a kindly yet timid compassion spread over a countenance crimsoned with habitual libations. This made the scene; save that on a chair by the bedside lay a profusion of long glossy golden ringlets, which had been cut from the head of the sufferer when the fever had begun to mount upwards; but which, with a jealousy that portrayed the darling littleness of a vain heart, she had seized and insisted on retaining near her; and save that, by the fire, perfectly inattentive to the event about to take place within the chamber, and to which we of the biped race attach so awful an importance, lay a large grey cat curled in a ball, and dozing with half-shut eyes, and ears that now and then denoted by a gentle inflection, the jar of a louder or nearer sound than usual upon her lethargic senses. The dying woman did not at first attend to the entrance either of Dummie or the female at the foot of the bed; but she turned herself round towards the child, and grasping his arm fiercely, she drew him towards her, and gazed