He drifted away from her through the nebulous haze deepening about him.  An occasional, objective buzzing penetrated to his removed place; but all the while he realized that he was getting farther and farther from such interruptions of an effort to distinguish a vaguely familiar, veiled shape.  He saw, at last, that it was Howat, a black Penny.  It was at once himself and that other Howat, yes, and Jasper.  All three unremarkably merged into one.  And the acts of the first, a dark young man with an erect, impatient carriage, a countenance and gaze of vigorous scorn, accumulated in a later figure, hardly less upright, slender, but touched with grey—­a man in the middle of life.  He paid with an anguished spirit for what had taken place; and at last an old man lingered with empty hands, the husk of a passion that had burned out all vitality.

Mariana, too, had been drawn into the wide implications of this mingled past and present.  But now, clearly, he recognized in her the meeting of spirit and flesh that had been denied to him.  That was life, he thought, that was happiness.  In the absence of such consummation he had come to nothing.  In Jasper, in Susan Brundon who had married him over late, the two had warred.

Life took the spirit to itself, mysteriously; wove the gold thread into its design of scarlet and earth and green, or else ... a hearth soon cold, the walls of a Furnace crumbled and broken, a ruin covered from memory by growing leafage and grass throbbing with the song of robins, the shrilling of frogs in the meadow.

The doctor and nurse, Rudolph and Mariana, moved about him in a far, low stir.  At times they approached on a lighter flood of oxygen.  Mariana wiped his lips—­an immaterial red stain.  But what was that confounded opera the name of which he had forgot?  It would be in his albums; in the first, probably.  Downstairs.  He had a sudden view of Mariana’s face as she returned with the volume.  An expression of piercing concern overwhelmed the reassuring smile she had for him.

Howat understood at last, he was dying.  An instinctive shuddering seized him; not in fear of the obliterating fact; but from a physical revulsion bred by his long years of delicate habit.

Yet it wouldn’t do to expose Mariana to the terrors; and, after a sharp, inward struggle, he said almost fretfully, “Further on.”  She turned the pages slowly; but no one could read without a decent light.  He moved his head, in an infinity of labour, toward the clear, grey opening of the window, and saw a pattern of flying geese wavering across the tranquil sky.

THE END