ll, between you
and any charlatan of the lot? Well, how is Madame de Netteville?'

'I have not seen her for six months,' Robert replied, with equal
abruptness.

The squire laughed a little under his breath.

'What did you think of her?'

'Very much what you told me to think--intellectually,' replied Robert,
facing him, but flushing with the readiness of physical delicacy.

'Well, I certainly never told you to think anything--_morally_,' said
the squire. 'The word moral has no relation to her. Whom did you see
there?'

The catechism was naturally most distasteful to its object, but Elsmere
went through with it, the squire watching him for a while with an
expression which had a spark of malice in it. It is not unlikely that
some gossip of the Lady Aubrey sort had reached him. Elsmere had always
seemed to him oppressively good. The idea that Madame de Netteville had
tried her arts upon him was not without its piquancy.

But while Robert was answering a question he was aware of a subtle
change in the squire's attitude--a relaxation of his own sense of
tension. After a minute he bent forward, peering through the darkness.
The squire's head had fallen back, his mouth was slightly open, and the
breath came lightly, quiveringly through. The cynic of a moment ago had
dropped suddenly into a sleep of more than childish weakness and
defencelessness.

Robert remained bending forward, gazing at the man who had once meant so
much to him.

Strange white face, sunk in the great chair! Behind it glimmered the
Donatello figure, and the divine Hermes, a glorious shape in the dusk,
looking scorn on human decrepitude. All round spread the dim walls of
books. The life they had nourished was dropping into the abyss out of
ken--they remained. Sixty years of effort and slavery to end so--a river
lost in the sands!

Old Meyrick stole in again, and stood looking at the sleeping squire.

'A bad sign! a bad sign!' he said, and shook his head mournfully.

After he had made an effort to take some food which Vincent pressed upon
him, Robert, conscious of a stronger physical _malaise_ than had ever
yet tormented him, was crossing the hall again, when he suddenly saw
Mrs. Darcy at the door of a room which opened into the hall. He went up
to her with a warm greeting.

'Are you going in to the squire? Let us go together.'

She looked at him with no surprise, as though she had seen him the day
before, and as he spoke she retreated a step