A faint dread crept into his consciousness; he roused himself sharply, straightened his shoulders, glanced about to see if his tacit surrender had been noticed—­this lassitude creeping over him, the indifference, was, at last, the edge of the authentic shadow of age, of decay; it was the deadening of the sensibilities preceding death.  He banished it immediately, and all his desire, his need, his sense of the horror of the past day, surged back, reanimated him, sent the blood strongly to its furthest confines.  But, none the less, a vague, disturbing memory of the other lingered at the back of his perceptions; he had a fresh realization of the necessity for him to make haste, to take at once—­before the hateful anodyne of time had betrayed his vigour—­what life still, and so fully, held.

His desire for Susan increased to an intensity robbing it of a greater part of the early joy; it had, now, a fretful aspect drawing him into long and painfully minute rehearsals of his every contact with her, and of the disgraceful publicity brought upon her by his past.  At the usual hour the hot wine appeared; the glassful was pressed on Amity Merken; his mother drank hers with the familiar, audible satisfaction.  An old custom, an old compound, brought from Germany many years ago, binding, in its petty immortality, distant times, places, beings.  He saw that his mother was noticeably less able than she had been the week before; her hands fumbled at her knitting, shook holding the glass.  Her lined face quivered as she said good night.  He bent and kissed a hot, dry brow, conscious of the blanched skull under her fading colour, her ebbing warmth.  He had done this, too—­hastened her death; she must have suffered inordinately in her prideful affection.  She said nothing, beyond the repeated admonition that he must not sit up into the night.

The next day he forced himself to read to the end the report of the murder in the Gazette.  The references to Susan Brundon were as scant as, evidently, Stephen Jannan could arrange; but her name, her Academy, were invested with an odious publicity.  Jasper Penny saw again that he was a person of moment; his part in the affair gave it a greatly augmented importance.  Yet now the worst, he told himself, was at an end; the publicity would recede; after a decent interval he could see Susan.

This mood was interrupted by an imperative communication from Stephen—­he must be in the other’s office at eleven o’clock to-morrow.  Nothing more definite was said; but Jasper Penny was not wholly surprised to see Essie Scofield huddled in a chair at the lawyer’s table.  She had made an attempt at the bravado of apparel, but it had evidently failed midway; her hair hung loosely about a damp brow, the strings of her bonnet were in disarray, a shawl partially hid a bodice wrongly fastened.  Her face was apathetic, with leaden shadows and dark lips ceaselessly twisting, now drawn into a petulant line,