“I don’t think there’s any grave risk so long as he—­remains as he is,” he ventured at last.  “But on the other hand, we mustn’t forget that he’s no longer a young man, and well, the machine is wearing out.  If he gets over the hot weather I don’t see why he shouldn’t get on very comfortably till the winter, and then if the winter does not bother him too much, well, I don’t see why anything should happen.”

Philip went back to the dining-room where his uncle was sitting.  With his skull-cap and a crochet shawl over his shoulders he looked grotesque.  His eyes had been fixed on the door, and they rested on Philip’s face as he entered.  Philip saw that his uncle had been waiting anxiously for his return.

“Well, what did he say about me?”

Philip understood suddenly that the old man was frightened of dying.  It made Philip a little ashamed, so that he looked away involuntarily.  He was always embarrassed by the weakness of human nature.

“He says he thinks you’re much better,” said Philip.

A gleam of delight came into his uncle’s eyes.

“I’ve got a wonderful constitution,” he said.  “What else did he say?” he added suspiciously.

Philip smiled.

“He said that if you take care of yourself there’s no reason why you shouldn’t live to be a hundred.”

“I don’t know that I can expect to do that, but I don’t see why I shouldn’t see eighty.  My mother lived till she was eighty-four.”

There was a little table by the side of Mr. Carey’s chair, and on it were a Bible and the large volume of the Common Prayer from which for so many years he had been accustomed to read to his household.  He stretched out now his shaking hand and took his Bible.

“Those old patriarchs lived to a jolly good old age, didn’t they?” he said, with a queer little laugh in which Philip read a sort of timid appeal.

The old man clung to life.  Yet he believed implicitly all that his religion taught him.  He had no doubt in the immortality of the soul, and he felt that he had conducted himself well enough, according to his capacities, to make it very likely that he would go to heaven.  In his long career to how many dying persons must he have administered the consolations of religion!  Perhaps he was like the doctor who could get no benefit from his own prescriptions.  Philip was puzzled and shocked by that eager cleaving to the earth.  He wondered what nameless horror was at the back of the old man’s mind.  He would have liked to probe into his soul so that he might see in its nakedness the dreadful dismay of the unknown which he suspected.