at false.

"Not so fast, Sir Charles--in the good Lord's name, not so fast. While
there's life there's hope, it's me settled opinion. I'm never for signing
a patient's death-warrant before the blessed soul of him's entirely
parted company with its mortal tenement of clay. The normal human being
takes a mighty lot of killing in my experience, where the will to live is
still intact. Let alone that you can never be quite upsides with Nature.
Ah! she's an astonishing box of tricks to draw on where final
dissolution's concerned. She glories to turn round on your pathological
and biological high science; and, while you're measuring a man for his
coffin, to help him give death the slip."

Charles Verity slightly shifted his position--and that with singular
carefulness--against the pillows in the deep red-covered chair. His
hands, inert and bluish about the finger-tips, lay along the padded arms
of it. The jacket of his grey-and-white striped flannel sleeping-suit was
unfastened at the throat, showing the irregular lift and fall of his
chest with each laboured breath. His features were accentuated, his face
drawn and of a surprising pallor.

The chair, in which he sat, had been brought forward into the wide arc of
the great window forming the front of the room. Two bays of this stood
open down to the ground. Looking out, beyond the rich brown of the
newly-turned earth in the flower-beds, the lawn stretched away--a dim
greyish green, under the long shadows cast by the hollies masking the
wall on the left, and glittering, powdered by myriads of scintillating
dewdrops, where the early sunshine slanted down on it from between their
stiff pinnacles and sharply serrated crests.

In the shrubberies robins sang, shrilly sweet. A murmur of waves,
breaking at the back of the Bar, hung in the chill, moist, windless air.
Presently a handbarrow rumbled and creaked, as West--the head gardener,
last surviving relic of Thomas Clarkson Verity's reign--wheeled it from
beneath the ilex trees towards the battery, leaving dark smudgy tracks
upon the spangled turf.

Arrived at his objective, the old gardener, with most admired
deliberation, loaded down long-handled birch-broom, rake and hoe; and
applied himself to mysterious peckings and sweeping of the gravel around
the wooden carriages of the little cannon and black pyramid of
ball.--Man, tools, and barrow were outlined against the pensive
brightness of autumn sea and autumn sky, which last,