ed hand stroking
that of the Squire with a yearning affection.

'When was the last attack?' asked Robert sadly.

'A month ago, sir, just after they got back. Ah, Mr. Elsmere, he
suffered. And he's been so lonely. No one to cheer him, no one to please
him with his food--to put his cushions right--to coax him up a bit, and
that,--and his poor sister too, always there before his eyes. Of course
he would stand to it, he liked to be alone. But I'll never believe men
are made so unlike one to the other. The Almighty meant a man to have a
wife or a child about him when he comes to the last. He missed you, sir,
when you went away. Not that he'd say a word, but he moped. His books
didn't seem to please him, nor anything else. I've just broke my heart
over him this last year.'

There was silence a moment in the big room, hung round with the
shapes of bygone Wendovers. The opiate had taken effect. The Squire's
countenance was no longer convulsed. The great brow was calm; a more
than common dignity and peace spoke from the long peaked face. Robert
bent over him. The madman, the cynic, had passed away; the dying scholar
and thinker lay before him.

'Will he rally?' he asked, under his breath.

Meyrick shook his head.

'I doubt it. It has exhausted all the strength he had left. The heart
is failing rapidly. I think he will sleep away. And, Mr. Elsmere, you
go--go and sleep. Benson and I'll watch. Oh, my scratch is nothing, sir.
I'm used to a rough-and-tumble life. But you go. If there's a change
we'll wake you.'

Elsmere bent down and kissed the Squire's forehead tenderly, as a son
might have done. By this time he himself could hardly stand. He crept
away to his own room, his nerves still quivering with the terror of that
sudden waking, the horror of that struggle.

It was impossible to sleep. The moon was at the full outside. He drew
back the curtains, made up the fire, and wrapping himself in a fur coat
which Flaxman had lately forced upon him, sat where he could see the
moonlit park, and still be within the range of the blaze.

As the excitement passed away a reaction of feverish weakness set in.
The strangest whirlwind of thoughts fled through him in the darkness,
suggested very often by the figures on the seventeenth century tapestry
which lined the walls. Were those the trees in the woodpath? Surely that
was Catherine's figure trailing--and that dome--strange! Was he still
walking in Grey's funeral procession, the Ox