rt, some time longer; but Chayter took a different and
a still more intimate view. Nick was embarrassed: he scarcely knew what
he was there for from the moment he could give his good old friend no
conscious satisfaction. The doctors, the nurses, the servants, Mrs.
Lendon, and above all the settled equilibrium of the square thick house,
where an immutable order appeared to slant through the polished windows
and tinkle in the quieter bells, all these things represented best the
kind of supreme solace to which the master was most accessible.

It was judged best that for the first day Nick should not be introduced
into the darkened room. This was the decision of the two decorous
nurses, of whom the visitor had had a glimpse and who, with their black
uniforms and fresh faces of business, suggested the barmaid emulating
the nun. He was depressed and restless, felt himself in a false
position, and thought it lucky Mrs. Lendon had powers of placid
acceptance. They were old acquaintances: she treated him formally,
anxiously, but it was not the rigour of mistrust. It was much more an
expression of remote Cornish respect for young abilities and
distinguished connexions, inasmuch as she asked him rather yearningly
about Lady Agnes and about Lady Flora and Lady Elizabeth. He knew she
was kind and ungrudging, and his main regret was for his meagre
knowledge and poor responses in regard to his large blank aunts. He sat
in the garden with newspapers and looked at the lowered blinds in Mr.
Carteret's windows; he wandered round the abbey with cigarettes and
lightened his tread and felt grave, wishing everything might be over. He
would have liked much to see Mr. Carteret again, but had no desire that
Mr. Carteret should see him. In the evening he dined with Mrs. Lendon,
and she talked to him at his request and as much as she could about her
brother's early years, his beginnings of life. She was so much younger
that they appeared to have been rather a tradition of her own youth; but
her talk made Nick feel how tremendously different Mr. Carteret had been
at that period from what he, Nick, was to-day. He had published at the
age of thirty a little volume, thought at the time wonderfully clever,
called _The Incidence of Rates_; but Nick had not yet collected the
material for any such treatise. After dinner Mrs. Lendon, who was in
merciless full dress, retired to the drawing-room, where at the end of
ten minutes she was followed by Nick, who h