as fond of me when she
was little, and she had gone away and wasn't fond of me any more. Oh,
Sybil--I feel like a lunatic--I mean you, of course; but you never
cared. And I went to a house agent's and got the house unfurnished, and
I bought the furniture--there's nothing much except what you've seen,
and a bed and a bath, and some pots and kettles; and I've lived alone in
that house, and I've written that book, with Death sitting beside me,
jogging my elbow every time I stopped writing, and saying, 'Hurry up;
I'm waiting here for you, and I shall have to take you away, and you'll
have done nothing, nothing, nothing.'"

"But you've done the book," said Sybil again. The larch and the garden
beyond were misty to her eyes. She set her teeth. He must be comforted.
Her own agony--that could be dealt with later.

"I've ridden myself with the curb," he said. "I thought it all
out--proper food, proper sleep, proper exercise. I wouldn't play the
fool with the last chance; and I pulled it off. I wrote the book in four
months; and every night, when I went to sleep, I wondered whether I
should ever wake to go on with the book. But I did wake, and then I used
to leap up and thank God, and set to work; and I've done it. The book
will live--every one says it will. I shan't have lived for nothing."

"Rupert," she said, "dear Rupert!"

"Thank you," he said forlornly; "you're very kind." And he drew his
limp hand from hers, and leaned his elbows on the grass and his chin on
his hands.

"Oh, Rupert, why didn't you write and tell me?"

"What was the use of making you sad? You were always sorry for maimed
things--even the worms the gardener cut in two with his spade."

She was struggling with a growing desire to scream and shriek, and to
burst out crying and tear the grass with her hands. He no longer loved
her--that was the lesser evil. She could have borne that--have borne
anything. But he was going to die! The intensity of her belief that he
was going to die caught her by the throat. She defended herself
instinctively.

"I don't believe it," she said.

"Don't believe what?"

"That you're going to die."

He laughed; and when the echo of that laugh had died away in the quiet
garden, she found that she could no longer even say that she did not
believe.

Then he said: "I am going to die, and all the values of things have
changed places. But I have done something: I haven't buried my talent
in a napkin. Oh, my Pretty, go away,