ed and opened the door
and came quickly in.

Hester the dog was with him and, bounding forward in the boisterous
manner of the well-meaning foolish creatures of her type, she sprang
upon the bed. Nicky ran forward as Archelaus uttered another cry, but
unlike the first. This was of pure high terror. Nicky seized the dog by
the scruff of the neck, so that she hung suspended for a moment in his
grasp above the bed, before he bore her to the door. Archelaus stared as
though he saw a ghost; his old mouth fell open, showing slack and curved
inwards like the mouth of a very young baby. His eyes glazed with his
terror; his cheeks had in that one minute assumed a pale, purplish hue,
on which the deep lines and darker veins stood out like a network laid
over his shrunken skin. He sat up in bed--he who had not lifted his head
for a week--and stayed rigid so for a few beating moments. Then he fell
back, crumpled up amid the pillows. Nicky had flung the dog outside, and
came to bend over him, casting a watchful eye towards Ishmael to see how
he was standing it. Ishmael's hand was slipped into the bed under his
brother's body; his eyes were fixed on his face.

"Go for the doctor, quickly, Nicky!" he said. "Go yourself."

The dying man opened his eyes and fixed them on Ishmael.

"No," he said, so faintly that Nicky had to bend low to hear; "no. You
don't need to send him away.... I've had a sign, Ishmael; I've had a
sign.... Oh, my soul, I've had a sign!..."

Ishmael bent over to him, trembling, waiting, wondering.

"All these years I've tried to forget ..." said Archelaus, "and the Lard
hasn't forgotten.... _Phoebe, Phoebe, keep the dog from off me!..._"
His voice cracked on arising scream. Then he fell into an exhausted
silence, but his eyes still sought Ishmael's. Profoundly stirred,
knowing that, at what was literally for him the last hour, Archelaus was
agreeing to forego the full cup of his revenge, wondering why and yet
too shaken to wonder intelligently, Ishmael called to him in sudden
passion:

"Archelaus ... brother! Try and think one thought of love, only one,
don't think of your fear. There's nothing there to hurt you. There's
only me and Nicky...." But Archelaus never spoke again. He lay and gazed
as though he were struggling for speech; in his eyes struggled the
tortured questioning of the inarticulate.

What it was that had struck home to his brother at the last Ishmael was
never to know, but he recognised that