"
"Ah! Nannie," replied poor Grace; "my father won't die of the gallows;
but he will of a broken heart."
"Better to be hanged," said the maniac, whose reason, after a lapse of
more than a year, was in some degree returning, precisely as life was
ebbing out, "bekase, thank God, there's then an end to it."
"I agree with you, Nannie, it might be only a long life of suffering;
but I wouldn't wish to see my father hanged."
"Do you know," said Nannie, relapsing into a deeper mood of her
mania,--"do you know that when I saw my father last he wouldn't nor
didn't spake to me? The house was filled with people, and my little
brother Frank--why now isn't it strange that I feel somehow as if I will
never wash his face again nor comb his white head in order to prepare
him for mass?--but whisper, Grace, sure then I was innocent and had not
met the destroyer."
The two unhappy girls looked at each other, and if ever there was a gaze
calculated to wring the human heart with anguish and with pity, it was
that gaze. Both of them were, although unconsciously, on the very eve of
dissolution, and it would seem as if a kind of presentiment of death had
seized upon both at the same time.
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