‘Is he unconscious?’

Leonora nodded.

Drawing a little nearer to the bed, Meshach signed to Millicent to approach, and gave her his stick.  Then he unbuttoned his overcoat, and his coat, and the flap-pocket of his trousers, and after much searching found a box of matches.  He shook out a match clumsily, and struck it, and came still nearer to the bed.  All wondered apprehensively what the old man was going to do, but none dared interfere or protest because he was so old, and so precariously attached to life, and because he was the head of the family.  With his thin, veined, trembling hand, he passed the lighted match close across John’s eyeballs; not a muscle twitched.  Then he extinguished the match, put it in the box, returned the box to his pocket, and buttoned the pocket and his coats.

‘Ay!’ he breathed.  ‘The lad’s unconscious right enough.  Let’s be going.’

Taking his stick from Milly, he clutched Arthur’s arm again, and very slowly left the room.

After a moment’s hesitation Leonora followed and overtook them at the bottom of the stairs; it was the first time she had forsaken the bedside.  She was surprised to see Fred Ryley in the hall, self-conscious but apparently determined to be quite at home.  She remembered that he said he should come up again as soon as he had arranged matters at the works.

‘Just take Mr. Myatt to the cab, will you?’ said Twemlow quietly to Fred.  ‘I’ll follow.’

‘Certainly,’ Fred agreed, pulling his moustache nervously.  ’Now, Mr. Myatt, let me help you.’

‘Ay!’ said Meshach.  ‘Thou shalt help me if thou’n a mind.’  As he was feeling for the step with his stick he stopped and looked round at Leonora.  ‘Lass!’ he exclaimed, ‘thou toldst me John was i’ smooth water.’  Then he departed and they could hear his shuffling steps on the gravel.

Twemlow glanced inquiringly at Leonora.

‘Come in here,’ she said briefly, pointing to the drawing-room.  They entered; it was dark.

‘Your uncle made me drive up with him,’ Arthur explained, as if in apology.

She ignored the remark.  ‘You must go back to New York—­at once,’ she told him, in a dry, curt voice.

‘Yes,’ he assented, ‘I suppose I’d better.’

‘And don’t write to me—­until after I have written.’

‘Oh, but——­’ he began.

She thought wildly:  ’This man, with his reason and his judgment, has not the slightest notion how I feel, not the slightest!’

‘I must write,’ he said in a persuasive tone.

‘No!’ she cried passionately and vehemently.  ’You aren’t to write, and you aren’t to see me.  You must promise, absolutely.’

‘For how long?’ he asked.

She shook her head.  ‘I don’t know, I can’t tell.’

‘But isn’t that rather——­’

‘Will you promise?’ she cried once more, quite loudly and almost fiercely.  And her accents were so full of entreaty, of command, and of despair, that Arthur feared a nervous crisis for her.