d his advice as to how to meet it--a thin little thread of laughter
that spanned the years and connected that time of which he spoke with
this present moment by the bed of death. The laugh died away and fell
again into the abysses from which it had been evoked, and there only
hung a silence in the room, but it was a silence thin, brittle as glass.

His lids drooped. Over his fast dimming brain the films of approaching
dissolution began to swirl, now thick and fast, now tenuous again, so
that he recognised Ishmael and what had happened for a fleeting moment
during which the old glee peeped out of his blurred eyes. Then he
drifted into sleep with the suddenness of an infant, a sleep quite
peaceful, as of one who has accomplished well his task and now may rest.
Ishmael sat on by the bed; sometimes he looked at him, even laid his
fingers on his pulse to make sure, with as much mechanical care as ever,
that he was indeed only sleeping. He sat on where he was, but with his
eyes staring out of the window, though they hardly saw the rolling
fields that lay, a burnished green, beneath the evening light. Once a
step came again to the door, and a voice asked if everything were all
right. Ishmael answered "Yes," bidding the questioner go away, and he
never knew that it had been Nicky's voice which asked.

CHAPTER IV

HESTER

Ishmael sat and watched his own thoughts pass before him. It is not
given to every man to see all that he has lived by lying broken around
him, and this was what had happened to Ishmael. He could see, now that
he had lost him, how it was the thought of his son at Cloom, far more
than Cloom itself, which had held ever deepening place in his heart and
soul. He remembered the night when Phoebe had whispered to him that
she was going to have a baby ... how she had clung about his neck and
how happy she had seemed. He remembered too--the recollection swam up to
him through years of blurred forgetting--an earlier night, when Phoebe
had won him back to her ... that night of passion which must have been
on her side a calculated thing, a trap for him to fall in blindly--as he
had. Phoebe--who had seemed so transparent, and whom, as he now
realised, no one but Archelaus had ever really known.... Yet none of
that hurt or even outraged him. What Phoebe had been was of supreme
unimportance. Not at this distance of years could he conjure up the
emotions of an outraged husband which even at the time would have seem