For in the bed, supported by many pillows, and facing Patricia, was a dying man.  He was very old, having thick tumbled hair which, like his two-weeks’ beard, was uniformly white.  His eyelids drooped a trifle, so that he seemed to meditate concerning something ineffably remote and serious, yet not, upon the whole, unsatisfactory.  You saw and heard the intake of each breath, so painfully drawn, and expelled with manifest relief, as if the man were very tired of breathing.  Yet the bedclothes heaved with his vain efforts just to keep on breathing.  And sometimes his parted lips would twitch curiously....  Rudolph Musgrave, too, could see all this quite plainly, in the mirror over the mantel.

The doctor spoke.  “Yes—­it’s the end, Professor Musgrave,” he said.  For this lean-featured red-haired stranger to whom the doctor spoke, a pedagogue to his finger-tips, had once been Patricia’s dearly-purchased, chubby baby Roger.

And Rudolph Musgrave stayed motionless.  He knew Patricia was there; but that fact no longer seemed either very strange or even unnatural; and besides, it was against some law for him to look at her until Patricia had called him....  Meanwhile, just opposite, above the mirror, and facing him, was the Stuart portrait of young Gerald Musgrave.  This picture had now hung there for a great many years.  The boy still smiled at you in undiminished raillery, even though he smiled ambiguously, and with a sort of humorous sadness in his eyes.  Once, very long ago—­when the picture hung downstairs—­some one had said that Gerald Musgrave’s life was barren.  The dying man could not now recollect, quite, who that person was.

Rudolph Musgrave stayed motionless.  He comprehended that he was dying.  The greatest of all changes was at hand; and he, who had always shrunk from making changes, was now content enough....  Indeed, with Rudolph Musgrave living had always been a vaguely dissatisfactory business, a hand-to-mouth proceeding which he had scrambled through, as he saw now, without any worthy aim or even any intelligible purpose.  He had nothing very heinous with which to reproach himself; but upon the other side, he had most certainly nothing of which to be particularly proud.

So this was all that living came to!  You heard of other people being rapt by splendid sins and splendid virtues, and you anticipated that to-morrow some such majestic energy would transfigure your own living, and change everything:  but the great adventure never arrived, somehow; and the days were frittered away piecemeal, what with eating your dinner, and taking a wholesome walk, and checking up your bank account, and dovetailing scraps of parish registers and land-patents and county records into an irrefutable pedigree, and seeing that your clothes were pressed, and looking over the newspapers—­and what with other infinitesimal avocations, each one innocent, none of any particular importance, and each consuming an irrevocable moment of the allotted time—­until at last you found that living had not, necessarily, any climax at all....  And Patricia would call him presently.