He was able to press his daughter's hand with his cold fingers, putting into that pressure all the thoughts, all the feelings he no longer had the power to utter.

There was something holy and solemn in that farewell of the brain which still lived, of the heart which gratitude revived.
Worn out by fruitless efforts, exhausted in the long struggle with the gigantic problem, desperate perhaps at the oblivion which awaited his memory, this giant among men was about to die.

His children surrounded him with respectful affection; his dying eyes were cheered with images of plenty and the touching picture of his prosperous and noble family.
His every look--by which alone he could manifest his feelings--was unchangeably affectionate; his eyes acquired such variety of expression that they had, as it were, a language of light, easy to comprehend.
Marguerite paid her father's debts, and restored a modern splendor to the House of Claes which removed all outward signs of decay.

She never left the old man's bedside, endeavoring to divine his every thought and accomplish his slightest wish.
Some months went by with those alternations of better and worse which attend the struggle of life and death in old people; every morning his children came to him and spent the day in the parlor, dining by his bedside and only leaving him when he went to sleep for the night.

The occupation which gave him most pleasure, among the many with which his family sought to enliven him, was the reading of newspapers, to which the political events then occurring gave great interest.