So the vicar escaped, almost as glad to do so as Austin was to be left in peace.  And the worst of it was that, though he cudgelled his brains for many hours that night, he could not think of any sins in particular that Austin had been in the habit of committing.  He was kind, he was pure, and he was unselfish.  His exaggerated abuse of people he didn’t like was more than half humorous, and was rather a fault than a sin.  Yet he must be a sinner somehow, because everybody was.  Perhaps his sin consisted in his not being pious in the evangelical sense of the word.  Yet he loved goodness, and the vicar had once heard a great Roman Catholic divine say that loving goodness was the same thing as loving God.  But Austin had never said that he loved God; he had only said that he was much obliged to Him.  The poor vicar worried himself about all this until he fell asleep, taking refuge in the reflection that if he couldn’t understand the state of Austin’s soul there was always the probability that God did.

Aunt Charlotte, on her side, was too much absorbed in her anxiety and sorrow to trouble herself with such misgivings.  The light of her life was burning very low, and bade fair to be extinguished altogether.  What were theological conundrums to her now?  It would be positively wicked to fear that anything dreadful could happen to Austin because he had forgotten his catechism and was not impressed by the vicar’s prosy discourses in church.  Face to face with the possibility of losing him, all her conventionality collapsed.  The boy had been everything in the world to her, and now he was going elsewhere.

The house was a very mournful place just then, and the servants moved noiselessly about as though in the presence of some strange mystery.  The only person in it who seemed really happy was Austin himself.  A great London surgeon came to see him once, and then there was talk of hiring a trained nurse.  But Austin combatted this project with all the vigour at his command, protesting that trained nurses always scented themselves with chloroform and put him in mind of a hospital; he really could not have one in the room.  Some assistance, however, was necessary, for the disease was making such rapid progress that he could no longer turn himself in bed; and Austin, recognising the fact, insisted that Lubin and no other should tend him.  So Lubin, tearfully overjoyed at the distinction, exchanged the garden for the sick-chamber, into which, as Austin said, he seemed to bring the very scent of grass and flowers; and there he passed his time, day after day, raising the helpless boy in his strong arms, shifting his position, anticipating his slightest wish, and even sleeping in a low truckle-bed in a corner of the room at night.