Dr. Martineau stood up softly.  Something beyond reason told him that this was certainly a dying man.  He was reluctant to go and he had an absurd desire that someone, someone for whom Sir Richmond cared, should come and say good-bye to him, and for Sir Richmond to say good-bye to someone.  He hated this lonely launching from the shores of life of one who had sought intimacy so persistently and vainly.  It was extraordinary—­he saw it now for the first time—­he loved this man.  If it had been in his power, he would at that moment have anointed him with kindness.

The doctor found himself standing in front of the untidy writing desk, littered like a recent battlefield.  The photograph of the American girl drew his eyes.  What had happened?  Was there not perhaps some word for her?  He turned about as if to enquire of the dying man and found Sir Richmond’s eyes open and regarding him.  In them he saw an expression he had seen there once or twice before, a faint but excessively irritating gleam of amusement.

“Oh!—­Well!” said Dr. Martineau and turned away.  He went to the window and stared out as his habit was.

Sir Richmond continued to smile dimly at the doctor’s back until his eyes closed again.

It was their last exchange.  Sir Richmond died that night in the small hours, so quietly that for some time the night nurse did not observe what had happened.  She was indeed roused to that realization by the ringing of the telephone bell in the adjacent study.

Section 5

For a long time that night Dr. Martineau had lain awake unable to sleep.  He was haunted by the figure of Sir Richmond lying on his uncomfortable little bed in his big bedroom and by the curious effect of loneliness produced by the nocturnal desk and by the evident dread felt by Sir Richmond of any death-bed partings.  He realized how much this man, who had once sought so feverishly for intimacies, had shrunken back upon himself, how solitary his motives had become, how rarely he had taken counsel with anyone in his later years.  His mind now dwelt apart.  Even if people came about him he would still be facing death alone.

And so it seemed he meant to slip out of life, as a man might slip out of a crowded assembly, unobserved.  Even now he might be going.  The doctor recalled how he and Sir Richmond had talked of the rage of life in a young baby, how we drove into life in a sort of fury, how that rage impelled us to do this and that, how we fought and struggled until the rage spent itself and was gone.  That eddy of rage that was Sir Richmond was now perhaps very near its end.  Presently it would fade and cease, and the stream that had made it and borne it would know it no more.