And so vanished away Elsley Vavasour, poet and genius, into his own place.

“Let us pray,” said a deep voice from behind the curtain:  it was Mark Armsworth’s.  He had come over with the first dawn, to bring the ladies food; had slipped upstairs to ask what news, found the door open, and entered in time to see the last gasp.

Lucia kept her head still buried:  and Tom, for the first time for many a year, knelt, as the old banker commended to God the soul of our dear brother just departing this life.  Then Mark glided quietly downstairs, and Valencia, rising, tried to lead Mrs. Vavasour away.

But then broke out in all its wild passion the Irish temperament.  Let us pass it over; why try to earn a little credit by depicting the agony and the weakness of a sister?

At last Thurnall got her downstairs.  Mark was there still, having sent off for his carriage.  He quietly put her arm through his, led her off, worn out and unresisting, drove her home, delivered her and Valencia into Mary’s keeping, and then asked Tom to stay and sit with him.

“I hope I’ve no very bad conscience, boy; but Mary’s busy with the poor young thing, mere child she is, too, to go through such a night; and, somehow, I don’t like to be left alone after such a sight as that!”

* * * * *

“Tom!” said Mark, as they sat smoking in silence, after breakfast, in the study.  “Tom!”

“Yes, sir!”

“That was an awful death-bed, Tom!”

Tom was silent.

“I don’t mean that he died hard, as we say; but so young, Tom.  And I suppose poets’ souls are worth something, like other people’s—­perhaps more.  I can’t understand ’em; but my Mary seems to, and people, like her, who think a poet the finest thing in the world.  I laugh at it all when I am jolly, and call it sentiment and cant:  but I believe that they are nearer heaven than I am:  though I think they don’t quite know where heaven is, nor where” (with a wicked wink, in spite of the sadness of his tone)—­“where they themselves are either.”

“I’ll tell you, sir.  I have seen men enough die—­we doctors are hardened to it:  but I have seen unprofessional deaths—­men we didn’t kill ourselves; I have seen men drowned, shot, hanged, run over, and worse deaths than that, sir, too;—­and, somehow, I never felt any death like that man’s.  Granted, he began by trying to set the world right, when he hadn’t yet set himself right; but wasn’t it some credit to see that the world was wrong?”

“I don’t know that.  The world’s a very good world.”

“To you and me; but there are men who have higher notions than I of what this world ought to be; and, for aught I know, they are right.  That Aberalva curate, Headley, had; and so had Briggs, in his own way.  I thought him once only a poor discontented devil, who quarrelled with his bread and butter because he hadn’t teeth to eat it with:  but there was more in the fellow, coxcomb as he was.  ’Tisn’t often that I let that croaking old bogy, Madam might have been, trouble me; but I cannot help thinking that if, fifteen years ago, I had listened to his vapourings more, and bullied him about them less, he might have been here still.”