the utmost scorn.  In the past—­dim shapes, scenes, that appeared to have occurred years before, but which in reality reached to last month, trooped through his mind.  Youth had vanished like a form dropping behind a hill.  He looked back; it was gone; his feet hurried forward into the unguessed future; anxiety joined him; the scent that was Ludowika accompanied him, an illusive figure.  He reached toward it.

He was standing at the foot of the bed where Felix Winscombe lay.  The latter was restless, and complained of pains in his arms, reaching down to his fingers.  Ludowika bent over him, her face stamped with concern.  She regarded Howat with a new expression—­narrowed eyes and a glimmer of flawless teeth:  a look he had never foreseen there; but it was impotent before the thing that was.  It had, however, the effect of intensifying his desire, his passion for her fragility of silk and flesh.  He would kiss her hate on her mouth.

She sat by the bedside, and Howat took a place opposite her.  Candles burned on a highboy, on a table at his back; and their auriferous light flowed in about the bedstead.  The latter was draped from the canopy to the bases of the posts in a bright printing of pheasants and conventional thickets—­cobalt and ruby and orange; and across a heavy counterpane half drawn up stalked a row of panoplied Indians in clipped zephyr.  It was a nebulous enclosure with the shadows of the hangings wavering on the coloured wool and cold linen, on the long, seamed countenance of the prostrate man.

A clock in the hall struck slowly—­it needed winding—­ten blurred notes.  Felix Winscombe took a sip of water.  A minute snapping sounded from the hearth.  A window stirred, and there was a dry turning of leaves without; wind.  One of the Indians, Howat saw, had his arm raised, flourishing a blade; a stupid effigy of savage spleen.  Beyond the drapery Ludowika’s face was dim and white.  It was like an ineffable May moon.  Ludowika ...  Penny.  For the first time Howat thought of her endowed with his name, and it gave him a deep thrill of delight.  He repeated it with moving but soundless lips—­Ludowika Penny.

Her husband lay with his eyes closed, his head bowed forward on his chest, as if in sleep.  At irregular intervals small, involuntary contractions of pain twitched at his mouth.  At times, too, he muttered noiselessly.  Extraordinary.  Ludowika and Felix Winscombe and himself, Howat Penny.  A world peopled only by them; the silence of the room dropped into infinite space, bottomless time.  A sudden dread of such vast emptiness seized Howat; he felt that he must say something, recreate about them the illusion of safe and familiar spaces and walls.  It seemed that he was unable to speak; a leaden inhibition lay on his power of utterance.  He made a harsh sound in his throat, loud and startling.  Felix Winscombe raised his head, and Ludowika cried faintly.  Then silence again folded them.