ossibility that he would rise up from his sickness and get to
work again. Death would end this, death with its finality and its utter
incongruous stillness. Death was repose, and neither for good nor for
evil had Quisante ever embraced repose. He had never been quiet; when he
was not achieving, he had been grimacing. In death he could do neither.

"I can't fancy the fellow dead," said Dick to his wife and his brother.
"I should be expecting him to jump up again every minute."

Lady Richard shuddered. The actual Quisante had been bad; the idea of a
dead Quisante horribly galvanized into movement by a restlessness that
the tomb could not stifle was hideous. Jimmy came to her aid with a
rather unfeeling but apparently serious suggestion.

"We must cremate him," he said gravely.

"No, but, barring rot," Dick pursued, "I don't believe he'll die, you
know."

"Poor May!" said Lady Richard. Neither of them pressed her to explain the
precise point in May Quisante's position which produced this exclamation
of pity. It might have been that the death was possible, or that the
death was not certain, or at least not near, or it might have sprung from
a purely general reflection on the unhappiness of having life coupled
with the life of such a man as Quisante.

All these voices of a much interested, much pitying, much (and on the
whole not unenjoyably) discussing world were heard only in dim echoes in
the Mildmays' big quiet house in Carlton-House Terrace, where Quisante
had been stricken by his blow. There May had found him on her hasty
return from Ashwood, and here he was still, thanks to the host's and
hostess's urgent entreaties. They declared that he was not fit to be
moved; the doctors hardly endorsed this view heartily but went so far as
to say that any disturbance was no doubt bad in its degree; Lady Mildmay
seized eagerly on the grudging support. "Let him stay here till he's fit
to go to the country," she urged. "I'm sure we can make him comfortable.
And--" she smiled apologetically, "I'm a good nurse, if I'm nothing else,
you know."

"But won't Sir Winterton----?"

"My dear, you don't know what a lot Winterton thinks of Mr. Quisante;
he's proud to be of the least service to him. And you do know, I think,
how it delights him to be any use at all to you."

In spite of that reason buried in her own heart which made every kindness
received from these kind hands bitter to her, May let him stay. He wanted
to stay, she th