t me know if he is
worse."

"It's very good of her," said Miss Ambient

I had exchanged a glance with Mark in which it is possible that he read
that my pity for him was untinged with contempt, though I know not why
he should have cared; and as, presently, his sister got up and took her
bedroom candlestick, he proposed that we should go back to his study. We
sat there till after midnight; he put himself into his slippers, into an
old velvet jacket, lighted an ancient pipe, and talked considerably less
than he had done before.

There were longish pauses in our communion, but they only made me feel
that we had advanced in intimacy. They helped me, too, to understand my
friend's personal situation, and to perceive that it was by no means the
happiest possible. When his face was quiet, it was vaguely troubled; it
seemed to me to show that for him, too, life was a struggle, as it has
been for many another man of genius. At last I prepared to leave him,
and then, to my ineffable joy, he gave me some of the sheets of his
forthcoming book,--it was not finished, but he had indulged in the
luxury, so dear to writers of deliberation, of having it "set up," from
chapter to chapter, as he advanced,--he gave me, I say, the early
pages, the _premices_, as the French have it, of this new fruit of his
imagination, to take to my room and look over at my leisure. I was just
quitting him when the door of his study was noiselessly pushed open, and
Mrs. Ambient stood before us. She looked at us a moment, with her candle
in her hand, and then she said to her husband that as she supposed he
had not gone to bed, she had come down to tell him that Dolcino was more
quiet and would probably be better in the morning. Mark Ambient made no
reply; he simply slipped past her in the doorway, as if he were afraid
she would seize him in his passage, and bounded upstairs, to judge
for himself of his child's condition. Mrs. Ambient looked slightly
discomfited, and for a moment I thought she was going to give chase
to her husband. But she resigned herself, with a sigh, while her eyes
wandered over the lamp-lit room, where various books, at which I had
been looking, were pulled out of their places on the shelves, and the
fumes of tobacco seemed to hang in mid-air. I bade her good-night, and
then, without intention, by a kind of fatality, the perversity which had
already made me insist unduly on talking with her about her husband's
achievements, I alluded to