It was a plain bare room; there was no curtain on the window and the sun shone in.  There was a smouldering fire in the grate, a bookshelf on one side, still holding its dusty and unused volumes; there was an arm-chair—­was that the chair in which he had sat to see his love-gifts trampled down, in which he had received that mysterious stroke from the unseen enemy?  There was also a table in the room, and a chest, and, in the corner, a pallet-bed, upon which lay the withered body of a man.  That was all, except some prints that hung upon the wall, dusty and lifeless-looking.  Such changes do years of disuse make in dwellings which, when inhabited, have been replete with human interest.  Even yet there was abundant indication that the room had once been the abode of one who put much of his own personality into his surroundings.  The chair and the chest were carved with a rude device—­the Devil grappling with the Son of God.  The prints were crude allegorical representations of Life and Death.  The books were full of the violent polemic of the Reformation.  A flowerpot stood on the window-sill; perhaps ten years ago it had had a flower in it, but now it held the apothecary’s empty phials.  Everything proclaimed the room tenantless.

Skelton walked to the bed and looked down upon it with profound curiosity.  Only the head lay above the coverlet; withered and shrunken it was, yet the brow was high, and it was plain that the features had been fine and strong, betokening the once keen and sensitive nerve—­there was nothing sensitive now; all thought and feeling had for ever fled.  The half-shut lids disclosed the vacant eyes; the hair lay clammy and matted on the wrinkled brow; there was nothing of life left but the breath.

’It’s my opinion, sir, that he’ll live out his natural time.  It’s a theory of mine that we are all born with a certain length of life in us, and, barring accident, that time we’ll live.  Well, of course this man had the accident of his stroke, which by rights ought to have done for him, but by some fluke he weathered it, and now he’ll live out his time.  If one could find out his ancestors and see how long they each lived, with a little calculation I could tell you how long he’d lie there.’  With that the apothecary poked his patient in the cheek, and jerked him by the arm, to show Skelton how completely consciousness was gone.  He would have treated a corpse with more respect:  the lowest of us has some reverence for death.

Just then the door, which had been left ajar, was pushed open, and a slight, sweet-faced woman came in from the street.  She was evidently a district Bible-reader, but, although perceiving that she had entered a house where she was not needed, she advanced as far as the bed and looked down upon it with a passion of tenderness and pity depicted on her face.

‘Bless you, mum, he ain’t suff’ring,’ said the apothecary.

‘I was thinking of his soul, not of his body,’ she said.  ’I was wondering if he had been prepared to meet his Creator.’