She had been summoned, I knew, to a long conference with her master the day before--the subject of which she would not tell me, though she acknowledged it concerned myself.

Ever since she had followed me about, very softly, for her, and called me more than once, as when I was a child, "my dear." She now came with half-dolorous, half-angry looks, to summon me to an interview with my father and Doctor Jessop.
I caught her parting mutterings, as she marched behind me: "Kill or cure, indeed,"-- "No more fit than a baby,"-- "Abel Fletcher be clean mad,"-- "Hope Thomas Jessop will speak out plain, and tell him so," and the like.

From these, and from her strange fit of tenderness, I guessed what was looming in the distance--a future which my father constantly held in terrorem over me, though successive illness had kept it in abeyance.

Alas! I knew that my poor father's hopes and plans were vain! I went into his presence with a heavy heart.
There is no need to detail that interview.

Enough, that after it he set aside for ever his last lingering hope of having a son able to assist, and finally succeed him in his business, and that I set aside every dream of growing up to be a help and comfort to my father.