stracting his thoughts a little from the squire, and that other
tragedy which the great house sheltered somewhere in its walls, he took
from his coat-pocket a French _Anthologie_ which had been Catherine's
birthday gift to him, and read a little before he fell asleep.

Then he slept profoundly--the sleep of exhaustion. Suddenly he found
himself sitting up in bed, his heart beating to suffocation, strange
noises in his ears.

A cry 'Help!' resounded through the wide empty galleries.

He flung on his dressing-gown, and ran out in the direction of the
squire's room.

The hideous cries and scuffling grew more apparent as he reached it. At
that moment Benson, the man who had helped to carry the squire, ran up.

'My God, sir!' he said, deadly white, 'another attack!'

The squire's room was empty, but the door into the lumber-room
adjoining it was open, and the stifled sounds came through it.

They rushed in and found Meyrick struggling in the grip of a white
figure, that seemed to have the face of a fiend and the grip of a tiger.
Those old bloodshot eyes--those wrinkled hands on the throat of the
doctor--horrible!

They released poor Meyrick, who staggered bleeding into the squire's
room. Then Robert and Benson got the squire back by main force. The
whole face was convulsed, the poor shrunken limbs rigid as iron.
Meyrick, who was sitting gasping, by a superhuman effort of will
mastered himself enough to give directions for a strong opiate. Benson
managed to control the madman while Robert found it. Then between them
they got it swallowed.

But nature had been too quick for them. Before the opiate could have had
time to work, the squire shrank together like a puppet of which the
threads are loosened, and fell heavily sideways out of his captors'
hands on to the bed. They laid him there, tenderly covering him from the
January cold. The swollen eyelids fell, leaving just a thread of white
visible underneath, the clenched hands slowly relaxed; the loud
breathing seemed to be the breathing of death.

Meyrick, whose wound on the head had been hastily bound up, threw
himself beside the bed. The night-light beyond cast a grotesque shadow
of him on the wall, emphasising, as though in mockery, the long straight
back, the ragged whiskers, the strange ends and horns of the bandage.
But the passion in the old face was as purely tragic as any that ever
spoke through the lips of an Antigone or a Gloucester.

'The last--the last