Gradually the house sank to rest.  Dixon creeping past the door of the sick-room, on his stockinged feet, could hear the moaning, the hoarse indeterminate sounds, now loud, now plaintive, made by the sufferer.  The day nurse came out with an anxious face, on her way to bed.  Mr. Faversham she said was very ill—­what could be done if it did become necessary to summon the doctor?  Dixon assured her the gardener who was also the groom was sleeping in the house, and the horse was in the stable.  She had only to wake Mrs. Dixon—­he showed her where and how.  In the dark corridor, amid all its obstructive lumber, these two people who had never seen each other before, man and woman, took anxious counsel for the help of an unconscious third, a complete stranger to both of them.

The night nurse gave a dose of morphia according to directions, and sat down on a low chair at the foot of the bed watching her patient.

About two o’clock in the morning, just as the darkness was beginning to thin, she was startled by a sound outside.  She half rose, and saw the door open to admit a tall and gaunt figure, whom she recognized as the master of the house.

She held up an anxious finger, but Melrose advanced in spite of it.  His old flowered dressing-gown and gray head came within the range of the night-light, and the nurse saw his shadow projected, grotesque and threatening, on the white traceries of the ceiling.  But he made no sound, and never looked at the nurse.  He stood surveying young Faversham for some time, as he lay hot and haggard with fever, yet sleeping under the power of morphia.  And at last, without a word, the nurse saw her formidable visitor depart.

Melrose returned to his own quarters.  The window of his room was open, and outside the great mountains, in a dewy dawn, were beginning to show purple through dim veils of silvery cloud.  He stood still, looking out.  His mind was churning like a yeasty sea.  Old facts came to the surface; faces once familiar; the form and countenance of a brother drowned at twenty in Sandford lasher on the Oxford Thames; friends of his early manhood, riding beside him to hounds, or over the rolling green of the Campagna.  Old instincts long suppressed, yet earlier and more primitive in him than those of the huckster and the curio-hunter, stirred uneasily.  It was true that he was getting old, and had been too long alone.  He thought with vindictive bitterness of Netta, who had robbed and deserted him.  And then, again, of his involuntary guest.

The strangest medley of ideas ran through his mind.  Self-pity; recollections connected with habits on which he had deliberately turned his back some thirty years before—­the normal pleasures, friendships, occupations of English society; fanatical hatred and resentment—­against two women in particular, the first of whom had, in his opinion, deliberately spoilt his life by a double cruelty, while the second—­his wife—­whom he had plucked up out of poverty, and the dust-heap of her disreputable relations, had ungratefully and wickedly rebelled against and deserted him.