‘Could you persuade Mr. Mannering to go to bed?’

Elizabeth rose with some hesitation and followed him into the library.  The great room, once so familiar, now so strange, the nurses in their white uniforms, moving silently, one standing by the bed, watch in hand—­Major Mannering on the farther side, motionless—­the smell of antiseptics, the table by the bed with all its paraphernalia of bandages, cups, glasses, medicine bottles—­the stillness of brooding death which held it all—­seemed to dash from her any last, blind, unreasonable hope that she might have cherished.

The Squire standing by the fire, where he had been opposing a silent but impatient opposition to the attempt of doctor and nurses to make him take some rest, saw Elizabeth enter.  His eyes clung to her as she approached him.  So she was near him—­and he was not cut off from her.

Then the surgeon watched with astonishment the sudden docility of a man who had already seemed to him one of the most unmanageable of persons.  What spell had this woman exercised?  At any rate, after a few whispered words from her, the Squire bowed his white head and followed her out of the room.

In the hall Elizabeth offered him a candle, and begged him to go to bed.  He shook his head, and pointed to a chair by the dying fire.

‘That will do.  Then I shall hear—­’

He threw himself into it.  She brought him a rug, for the night was chilly, and he submitted.

Then she was going away, for it was past midnight, but something in his fixed look, his dull suffering, checked her.  She took an old stool and sat down near him.  Neither spoke, but his eyes gradually turned to hers, and a strange communion arose between them.  Though there were no words, he seemed to be saying to her—­’My boy!—­my boy!’—­over and over again—­and then—­’Stay there!—­for God’s sake, stay!’

And she stayed.  The failing lamp showed her upturned face, with its silent intensity of pity, her hands clasped round her knees, and the brightness of her hair.  The long minutes passed.  Then suddenly the Squire’s eyelids fell, and he slept the sleep of a man physically and mentally undone.

Aubrey Mannering sat by his brother all night.  With the first dawn Desmond awoke, and there was an awful interval of pain.  But a fresh morphia injection eased it, and Aubrey presently saw a smile—­a look of the old Desmond.  The nurse washed the boy’s hands and face, brought him a cup of tea, took pulse and temperature.

‘He’s no worse,’ she said in a whisper to Aubrey, as she passed him.

Aubrey went up to the bed.

‘Aubrey, old chap!’ said the boy, and smiled at him.  Then—­’It’s daylight.  Can’t I look out?’

The nurse and Mannering wheeled his bed to the window, which opened to the ground.  A white frost was on the grass, and there was a clear sky through which the sunrise was fast mounting.  Along an eastern wood ran a fiery rose of dawn, the fine leaf-work of the beeches showing sharply upon it.  There was a thrush singing, and a robin came close to the window, hopped on the ledge, and looked in.