t, looking up. 'It's not worth while,
when you can say your mind of the master.'

Old Meyrick sighed.

'Well,' said Robert, after a moment, his lip drawn and quivering, 'you
told him the story, I suppose? Seven deaths, is it, by now? Well, what
sort of impression did these unfortunate accidents'--and he
smiled--'produce?'

'He talked of sending money,' said Meyrick doubtfully; 'he said he would
have Henslowe up and inquire. He seemed put about and annoyed. Oh, Mr.
Elsmere, you think too hardly of the squire, that you do!'

They strolled on together in silence. Robert was not inclined to
discuss the matter. But old Meyrick seemed to be labouring under some
suppressed emotion, and presently he began upon his own experiences as a
doctor of the Wendover family. He had already broached the subject more
or less vaguely with Robert. Now, however, he threw his medical reserve,
generally his strongest characteristic, to the winds. He insisted on
telling his companion, who listened reluctantly, the whole miserable and
ghastly story of the old squire's suicide. He described the heir's
summons, his arrival just in time for the last scene with all its
horrors, and that mysterious condition of the squire for some months
afterwards, when no one, not even Mrs. Darcy, had been admitted to the
Hall, and old Meyrick, directed at intervals by a great London doctor,
had been the only spectator of Roger Wendover's physical and mental
breakdown, the only witness of that dark consciousness of inherited
fatality which at that period of his life not even the squire's iron
will had been able wholly to conceal.

Robert, whose attention was inevitably roused after a while, found
himself with some curiosity realising the squire from another man's
totally different point of view. Evidently Meyrick had seen him at such
moments as wring from the harshest nature whatever grains of tenderness,
of pity, or of natural human weakness may be in it. And it was clear,
too, that the squire, conscious perhaps of a shared secret, and feeling
a certain soothing influence in the _naivete_ and simplicity of the old
man's sympathy, had allowed himself at times, in the years succeeding
that illness of his, an amount of unbending in Meyrick's presence, such
as probably no other mortal had ever witnessed in him since his earliest
youth.

And yet how childish the old man's whole mental image of the squire was
after all! What small account it made of the subtleties