ad the tears running down his face, and
couldn't say a word, and they hustled him out, sort of holding their
noses again, and sort of disinfecting the place as they went along. He
said to me, brokenly, 'Hapgood, I felt I'd touched bottom. My old
friend, you know.' He said he went again next morning, like a tradesman,
just to beg for news. They told him, 'Papa has passed away.' He asked
them, 'Did he say anything at the last? Do please tell me just that.'
They said he suddenly almost sat up and called out something they
couldn't understand about, 'Ay, ready!' Sabre said he understood and
thanked God for it. He didn't tell me what it meant; it broke him right
up even talking about it. There was another thing he mentioned but
wouldn't go into. Some other great friend, a woman, whom he said he'd
cut right off out of his acquaintance--wouldn't answer her letters:
realised how the world was regarding him and felt he couldn't impose
himself on any one. He seemed to suffer over that, too."

II

"Well, that was the morning, old man. That was the first part, and you
see how it went. He was pretty badly in the depths but he was holding
on. He'd got this great discovery of his, and the idea of writing about
it after his History, he said. 'If I'm ever able to take up my History
again,' he said. Badly down as he was, at least he'd got that and he'd
also got to help him the extraordinary, reasonable, reasoning view he
took of the whole business: no bitterness against any one, just
understanding their point of view as he always has understood the other
point of view, just that and puzzling over it all. On the whole, and
considering all things, not too bad. Not too bad. Bad, desperately
pathetic, I thought, but not too bad. That was the morning. He wouldn't
come to lunch with us. He hadn't liked meeting my wife as it was. And of
course I could understand how he felt, poor chap. So I left him.

"I left him. When I saw him again was about three o'clock, and I walked
right into the middle of the development that, as I told you, has pretty
well let the roof down on him.

"I strolled round to his hotel, a one-horse sort of place off the front.
He was in the lobby. No one else there. Only a man who'd just been
speaking to him and who left him and went out as I came in.

"Sabre had two papers in his hands. He was staring at them and you'd ha'
thought from his face he was staring at a ghost. What d'you think they
were? Guess. Man alive,