ld movement of escape. Something rolled from her lap
and fell between them. She made a dash towards the object. But Tanqueray
had picked it up. It was a pair of Tanqueray's gloves, neatly folded.

"What were you doing with those gloves?" he said.

"I was mendin' them," said she.

Half-an-hour later Rose and Tanqueray were walking up the East Heath
Road towards their little house. Rose carried Tanqueray's gloves, and
Tanqueray carried Minny, the cat, in a basket.

As they went they talked about Owen Prothero. And Tanqueray thanked God
that, after all, there was something they _could_ talk about.

LXVII

Dr. Brodrick had declared for the seventh time that Prothero was
impossible.

His disease was advancing. Both lungs were attacked now. There was, as
he perfectly well knew, consolidation at the apex of the left lung; the
upper lobe had retracted, leaving his heart partially uncovered, and he
knew it; you could detect also a distinct systolic murmur; and nobody
could be more aware than Prothero of the gravity of these signs. Up till
now, he, Brodrick, had been making a record case of him. The man had a
fine constitution (he gave him credit for that); he had pluck; there was
resistance, pugnacity in every nerve. He had one chance, a fighting
chance. His life might be prolonged for years, if he would only rest.

And there he was, with all that terrible knowledge in him, sitting up in
bed, driving that infernal pen of his as if his life depended on _that_.
Scribbling verses, he was, working himself into such a state of
excitement that his temperature had risen. He displayed, Brodrick said,
an increasing nervous instability. When Brodrick told him that (if he
wanted to know) his inspiration was hollow, had been hollow for months,
and that he would recognize that as one of the worst symptoms in his
case, Prothero said that his critics had always told him that. The worst
symptom in his case, _he_ declared, was that he couldn't laugh without
coughing. When Brodrick said that it wasn't a laughing matter, he
laughed till he spat blood and frightened himself. For he had (Brodrick
had noticed it) a morbid horror of the sight of blood. You had to inject
morphia after every haemorrhage, to subdue that awful agitation.

All this the Doctor recounted to Laura, alone with her in her forlorn
little drawing-room down-stairs. He unveiled for her intelligence the
whole pathology of the case. It brought him back to what he had