"
She spoke the last words with a gentle reluctance, as if it required
almost more energy than she could command to pronounce the faint and
lingering syllables. Scarcely had they loitered through her lips ere
she was lost in slumber. Aylmer sat by her side, watching her aspect
with the emotions proper to a man the whole value of whose existence
was involved in the process now to be tested. Mingled with this mood,
however, was the philosophic investigation characteristic of the man
of science. Not the minutest symptom escaped him. A heightened flush
of the cheek, a slight irregularity of breath, a quiver of the eyelid,
a hardly perceptible tremor through the frame,--such were the details
which, as the moments passed, he wrote down in his folio volume. Intense
thought had set its stamp upon every previous page of that volume; but
the thoughts of years were all concentrated upon the last.
While thus employed, he failed not to gaze often at the fatal hand,
and not without a shudder. Yet once, by a strange and unaccountable
impulse, he pressed it with his lips.
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