passage, or a creak, or a sense of waiting which was almost a sound.

"Perhaps some of them have gone when they have been as I am," he had
said one black night, when he had sat in his room staring at the floor.
"If a man was dragged out when he had not LIVED a day, he would come
back I should come back if--God! A man COULD not be dragged away--like
THIS!"

And to sit alone and think of it was an awful and a lonely thing--a
lonely thing.

But loneliness was nothing new, only that in these months his had
strangely intensified itself. This, though he was not aware of it, was
because the soul and body which were the completing parts of him were
within reach--and without it. When he went down to breakfast he sat
singly at his table, round which twenty people might have laughed and
talked. Between the dining-room and the library he spent his days when
he was not out of doors. Since he could not afford servants, the many
other rooms must be kept closed. It was a ghastly and melancholy thing
to make, as he must sometimes, a sort of precautionary visit to the
state apartments. He was the last Mount Dunstan, and he would never see
them opened again for use, but so long as he lived under the roof he
might by prevision check, in a measure, the too rapid encroachments
of decay. To have a leak stopped here, a nail driven or a support put
there, seemed decent things to do.

"Whom am I doing it for?" he said to Mr. Penzance. "I am doing it
for myself--because I cannot help it. The place seems to me like some
gorgeous old warrior come to the end of his days It has stood the war of
things for century after century--the war of things. It is going now I
am all that is left to it. It is all I have. So I patch it up when I can
afford it, with a crutch or a splint and a bandage."

Late in the afternoon of the day on which Miss Vanderpoel rode away from
West Ways with Lord Westholt, a stealthy and darkly purple cloud rose,
lifting its ominous bulk against a chrysoprase and pink horizon. It
was the kind of cloud which speaks of but one thing to those who watch
clouds, or even casually consider them. So Lady Anstruthers felt some
surprise when she saw Sir Nigel mount his horse before the stone steps
and ride away, as it were, into the very heart of the coming storm.

"Nigel will be caught in the rain," she said to her sister. "I wonder
why he goes out now. It would be better to wait until to-morrow."

But Sir Nigel did not think so. He h