He rested a little.  They brought him food; and Aldous sat beside him making pretence to read, so that he might be encouraged to rest.  His sister came and went; so did the doctor.  But when they were once more alone, Hallin put out his hand and touched his companion.

“What is it, dear Ned?”

“Only one thing more, before we leave it.  Is that all that stands between you now—­the whole?  You spoke to me once in the summer of feeling angry, more angry than you could have believed.  Of course, I felt the same.  But just now you spoke of its all being your fault.  Is there anything changed in your mind?”

Aldous hesitated.  It was extraordinarily painful to him to speak of the past, and it troubled him that at such a moment it should trouble Hallin.

“There is nothing changed, Ned, except that perhaps time makes some difference always.  I don’t want now”—­he tried to smile—­“as I did then, to make anybody else suffer for my suffering.  But perhaps I marvel even more than I did at first, that—­that—­she could have allowed some things to happen as she did!”

The tone was firm and vibrating; and, in speaking, the whole face had developed a strong animation most passionate and human.

Hallin sighed.

“I often think,” he said, “that she was extraordinarily immature—­much more immature than most girls of that age—­as to feeling.  It was really the brain that was alive.”

Aldous silently assented; so much so that Hallin repented himself.

“But not now,” he said, in his eager dying whisper; “not now.  The plant is growing full and tall, into the richest life.”

Aldous took the wasted hand tenderly in his own.  There was something inexpressibly touching in this last wrestle of Hallin’s affection with another’s grief.  But it filled Aldous with a kind of remorse, and with the longing to free him from that, as from every other burden, in these last precious hours of life.  And at last he succeeded, as he thought, in drawing his mind away from it.  They passed to other things.  Hallin, indeed, talked very little more during the day.  He was very restless and weak, but not in much positive suffering.  Aldous read to him at intervals, from Isaiah or Plato, the bright sleepless eyes following every word.

At last the light began to sink.  The sunset flooded in from the Berkshire uplands and the far Oxford plain, and lay in gold and purple on the falling woods and the green stretches of the park.  The distant edges of hill were extraordinarily luminous and clear, and Aldous, looking into the west with the eye of one to whom every spot and line were familiar landmarks, could almost fancy he saw beyond the invisible river, the hill, the “lovely tree against the western sky,” which keep for ever the memory of one with whose destiny it had often seemed to him that Hallin’s had something in common.  To him, as to Thyrsis, the same early joy, the same “happy quest,” the same “fugitive and gracious light” for guide and beacon, that—­