 it will do him good to see you. Keep as quiet as
you can; take off your things, and come up-stairs with me.«
    Maggie obeyed, with that terrible beating of the heart which makes existence
seem simply a painful pulsation. The very quietness with which Mr. Turnbull
spoke had frightened her susceptible imagination. Her father's eyes were still
turned uneasily towards the door when she entered and met the strange, yearning,
helpless look that had been seeking her in vain. With a sudden flash and
movement, he raised himself in the bed - she rushed towards him, and clasped him
with agonised kisses.
    Poor child! it was very early for her to know one of those supreme moments
in life when all we have hoped or delighted in, all we can dread or endure,
falls away from our regard as insignificant - is lost, like a trivial memory, in
that simple, primitive love which knits us to the beings who have been nearest
to us, in their times of helplessness or of anguish.
    But that flash of recognition had been too great a strain on the father's
bruised, enfeebled powers. He sank back again in renewed insensibility and
rigidity, which lasted for many hours, and was only broken by a flickering
return of consciousness, in which he took passively everything that was given to
him, and seemed to have a sort of infantine satisfaction in Maggie's near
presence - such satisfaction as a baby has when it is returned to the nurse's
lap.
    Mrs. Tulliver sent for her sisters, and there was much wailing and lifting
up of hands below stairs: both uncles and aunts saw that the ruin of Bessy and
her family was as complete as they had ever foreboded it, and there was a
general family sense that a judgment had fallen on Mr. Tulliver, which it would
be an impiety to counteract by too much kindness. But Maggie heard little of
this, scarcely ever leaving her father's bedside, where she sat opposite him
with her hand on his. Mrs. Tulliver wanted to have Tom fetched home, and seemed
to be thinking more of her boy even than of her husband; but the aunts and
uncles opposed this. Tom was better at school, since Mr. Turnbull said there was
no immediate danger, he believed. But at the end of the second day, when Maggie
had become more accustomed to her father's fits of insensibility, and to the
expectation that he would revive from them, the thought of Tom had become urgent
with her too; and when her mother sate crying at
