ir along the sky.

Yesterday he had described to his wife Nevil's chattering of hundreds to
the minute. He had not realized the description, which had been only his
manner of painting delirium: there had been no warrant for it. He heard
the wild scudding voice imperfectly: it reminded him of a string of
winter geese changeing waters. Shower gusts, and the wail and hiss of the
rows of fir-trees bordering the garden, came between, and allowed him a
moment's incredulity as to its being a human voice. Such a cry will often
haunt the moors and wolds from above at nightfall. The voice hied on,
sank, seemed swallowed; it rose, as if above water, in a hush of wind and
trees. The trees bowed their heads rageing, the voice drowned; once more
to rise, chattering thrice rapidly, in a high-pitched key, thin, shrill,
weird, interminable, like winds through a crazy chamber-door at midnight.

The voice of a broomstick-witch in the clouds could not be thinner and
stranger: Lord Romfrey had some such thought.

Dr. Gannet was the bearer of Miss Denham's excuses to Lord Romfrey for
the delay in begging him to enter the house: in the confusion of the
household his lordship's card had been laid on the table below, and she
was in the sick-room.

'Is my nephew a dead man?' said the earl.

The doctor weighed his reply. 'He lives. Whether he will, after the
exhaustion of this prolonged fit of raving, I don't dare to predict. In
the course of my experience I have never known anything like it. He
lives: there's the miracle, but he lives.'

'On brandy?'

'That would soon have sped him.'

'Ha. You have everything here that you want?'

'Everything.'

'He's in your hands, Gannet.'

The earl was conducted to a sitting-room, where Dr. Gannet left him for a
while.

Mindful that he was under the roof of his enemy, he remained standing,
observing nothing.

The voice overheard was off at a prodigious rate, like the far sound of a
yell ringing on and on.

The earl unconsciously sought a refuge from it by turning the leaves of a
book upon the table, which was a complete edition of Harry Denham's
Poems, with a preface by a man named Lydiard; and really, to read the
preface one would suppose that these poets were the princes of the earth.
Lord Romfrey closed the volume. It was exquisitely bound, and presented
to Miss Denham by the Mr. Lydiard. 'The works of your illustrious
father,' was written on the title-page. These writers deal queerly wit