and companionship as we draw nearer to the
last one of all--the heaviest or lightest, which will it be? The old
boy had been canvassing this point with another old boy, a real Major,
our friend Roper, at the Hurkaru Club not long before, and, after he
had read a few pages of "Harry Lorrequer" he put his spectacles in to
keep the place, and fell back into a maze of recurrence and reflection.

Was he honest, or was it affectation, when he said to that pursy and
purple old warrior that if the doctor were to tell him he had but an
hour to live he should feel greatly relieved and happy? Was his heart
only pretending to laugh at the panic his old friend was stricken with
at the mere mention of the word "death"--he who had in his time faced
death a hundred times without a qualm? But then that was military
death, and was his _business_. Death the civilian, with paragraphs in
the newspapers to say "the worst" was feared, and the fever being kept
down, and the system being kept up, and smells of carbolic acid and
hourly bulletins--that was the thing he shrank from. Why, the Major
could remember old Jack Roper at Delhi, in the Mutiny, going out in
the darkness to capture those Sepoy guns--what was that place
called--Ludlow Castle?--and now!...

"Oh dammy, Colonel! Why, good Lard! who's dyin' or goin' to die? Time
enough to talk about dyin' when the cap fits. You take my advice, and
try a couple of Cockle's anti-bilious. My word for it, it's liver!..."
And then old Jack followed this with an earthquake-attack of coughing
that looked very much as if the cap was going to fit. But came out of
it incorrigible, and as soon as he could speak endorsed his advice
with an admonitory forefinger: "You do as I tell you, and try 'em."

But the fossil, who was ten years his senior, answered his own question
to himself in the affirmative as he sat there listening to the distant
murmur of wheels on the Uxbridge Road and the music of the cats
without. Yes, he was quite honest about it. He had no complaint to
make of life, for the last twenty years at any rate. His dear little
_protegee_--that was how he thought of Sally's mother--had taken
good care of that. But he had some harsh indictments against earlier
years--or rather _had_ had. For he had dismissed the culprits with
a caution, and put the records on a back-shelf.

He could take them down now and look at them without flinching. After
all, he was so near the end! What did it matter?

The