A little before ten o’clock Nicky-Nan climbed the stairs painfully to his bedroom, undressed in part, and lay down—­but not to sleep.  For a while he lay without extinguishing the candle—­his last candle.  He had measured it carefully, and it reached almost to an inch beyond the knuckle of his forefinger.  It would last him a good two hours at least, perhaps three.

He lay for a while almost luxuriously, save for the pain in his leg, and watched the light flickering on the rafters.  They had a few more days to abide, let Pamphlett’s men be never so sharp:  but this was his last night under them.  His enemies—­some of them until this morning unsuspected—­were closing in around him.  They had him, now, in this last corner.

But that was for to-morrow.  The very poor live always on the edge of to-morrow; and for that reason the night’s sleep, which parts them from it, seems a long time.

After all, what could his enemies do to him?  If he sat passive, the onus would rest on them.  If Policeman Rat-it-all flung him into the street, why then in the street he would sit, to the scandal of Polpier.  If, on the other hand, Government claimed him for a deserter, still Government would have to fetch a cart to convey him to jail:  his leg would not allow him to walk.  Of wealth and goods God Almighty had already eased him. Cantat vacuus . . .  He slid a hand under the bed-clothes and rubbed the swelling on his leg, softly, wondering if condemned men felt as little perturbed—­or some of them—­on the eve of execution.

He ceased rubbing and lay still again, staring up at the play of light on the rafters.  Fine old timbers they were . . . solid English oak.  Good old families they had sheltered in their time; men and women that feared God and honoured the King—­now all gone to decay in churchyard, all as cold as homeless fellows.  The Nanjivells had been such a family, and now—­what would his poor old mother think of this for an end?  Yet it was the general fate.  Pushing men, your Pamphletts, rise in the world.  Old families go down, . . . it couldn’t be worked else.  If he had only been born with push, now!  If it could only be started over again, . . . if he had been put to a trade, instead of being let run to sea—­

He broke off to wonder at the different things the old beams had looked down upon.  Marriages, births—­and deaths.  The Old Doctor (he knew) had died in the fore-room, for convenience—­the room where the Penhaligons slept:  and even so, the family had been forced to lift the coffin in and out of the window, because of that twist in the stairs.  There wasn’t that difficulty with people’s coming into the world.  No doubt in its time this room must have seen a mort of births too. . . .  And the children?  All gone, the same way!  Drizzle o’ rain upon churchyard graves. . . .  “And you, too,”—­with a flicker of his closing eyelids threatening the flicker on the beams—­ “you, too, doomed, my billies!  Pamphlett’ll take me to-morrow, you the day after; as in time the Devil’ll take him and his!”