‘Can you send some one round with me for the medicine?’ he asked in the doorway.  ‘Happen you’ll come yourself, John?’

There was a momentary hesitation.

‘I’ll come, doctor,’ said Rose.  ’And then you can give me all your instructions.  Mother must stay here.’  She completely ignored her father.

‘Do, my dear; come by all means.’  And the doctor beamed again suddenly with the maximum of cheerfulness.

* * * * *

Meshach had given no sign of life; his eyes, staring upwards and outwards, were still unchangeably fixed on the same portion of the ceiling.  He ignored equally the nonchalant and expert attentions of the doctor, the false solicitude of John, Leonora’s passionate anxiety, and Rose’s calm self-confidence.  He treated the fomentations with the apathy which might have been expected from a man who for fifty years had been accustomed to receive the meek skilled service of women in august silence.  One could almost have detected in those eyes a glassy and profound secret amusement at the disturbance which he had caused—­a humorous appreciation of all the fuss:  the maids with their hair down their backs bending and whispering over a stove; Ethel and Milly trudging scared through the nocturnal streets; Rose talking with demure excitement to old Hawley in his aromatic surgery; John officiously carrying kettles to and fro, and issuing orders to Bessie in the passage; Leonora cast violently out of one whirlpool into another; and some unknown expectant terrified pair wondering why the doctor, who had been warned months before, should thus culpably neglect their urgent summons.  As he lay there so grim and derisive and solitary, so fatigued with days and nights, so used up, so steeped in experience, and so contemptuously unconcerned, he somehow baffled all the efforts of blankets, cloths, and bags to make his miserable frame look ridiculous.  He had a majesty which subdued his surroundings.  And in this room hitherto sacred to the charming mysteries of girlhood his cadaverous presence forced the skirts and petticoats on Milly’s bed, and the disordered apparatus on the dressing-table, and the scented soaps on the washstand, and the row of tiny boots and shoes which Leonora had arranged near the wardrobe, to apologise pathetically and wistfully for their very existence.

‘Is that enough mustard?’ John inquired idly.

‘Yes,’ said Leonora.

She realised—­but not in the least because he had asked a banal question about mustard—­that he was perfectly insensible to all spiritual significances.  She had been aware of it for many years, yet the fact touched her now more sharply than ever.  It seemed to her that she must cry out in a long mournful cry:  ‘Can’t you see, can’t you feel!’ And once again her husband might justifiably have demanded:  ’What have I done this time?’

‘I wish one of those girls would come back from Church Street,’ he burst out, frowning.  ‘They’re here!’ He became excited as he listened to light rapid footsteps on the stair.  But it was Rose who entered.