f a white
figure, that seemed to have the face of a fiend and the grip of a tiger.
Those old bloodshot eyes--those wrinkled hands on the throat of the
doctor--horrible!

They released poor Meyrick, who staggered bleeding into the Squire's
room. Then Robert and Benson got the Squire back by main force. The
whole face was convulsed, the poor shrunken limbs rigid as iron.
Meyrick, who was sitting gasping, by a superhuman effort of will
mastered himself enough to give directions for a strong opiate. Benson
managed to control the madman while Robert found it. Then between them
they got it swallowed.

But nature had been too quick for them. Before the opiate could have
had time to work, the Squire shrank together like a puppet of which
the threads are loosened, and fell heavily sideways out of his captors'
hands on to the bed. They laid him there, tenderly covering him from the
January cold. The swollen eyelids fell, leaving just a thread of
white visible underneath, the clenched hands slowly relaxed; the loud
breathing seemed to be the breathing of death.

Meyrick, whose wound on the head had been hastily bound up, threw
himself beside the bed. The night-light beyond cast a grotesque shadow
of him on the wall, emphasizing, as though in mockery, the long straight
back, the ragged whiskers, the strange ends and horns of the bandage.
But the passion in the old face was as purely tragic as any that ever
spoke through the lips of an Antigone or a Gloucester.

'The last--the last!' he said, choked, the tears falling down his lined
cheeks on to the Squire's hand. 'He can never rally from this. And I was
fool enough to think yesterday I had pulled him through!'

Again a long gaze of inarticulate grief; then he looked up at Robert.

'He wouldn't have Benson to-night. I slept in the next room with the
door ajar. A few minutes ago I heard him moving. I was up in an instant,
and found him standing by that door, peering through, bare-footed, a
wind like ice coming up. He looked at me, frowning, all in a flame. "_My
father_," he said--"_my father_--he went that way--what do _you_ want
here? Keep back!" I threw myself on him; he had something sharp which
scratched me on the temple; I got that away from him, but it was his
hands'--and the old man shuddered. 'I thought they would have done for
me before anyone could hear, and that then he would kill himself as his
father did.'

Again be hung over the figure on the bed--his own wither