If Mr. Bell had had a prophetic eye he might have seen the torch all but inverted, and the angel with the grave and composed face standing very nigh, beckoning to his friend.  That night Mr. Hale laid his head down on the pillow on which it never more should stir with life.  The servant who entered his room in the morning, received no answer to his speech; drew near the bed, and saw the calm, beautiful face lying white and cold under the ineffaceable seal of death.  The attitude was exquisitely easy; there had been no pain—­no struggle.  The action of the heart must have ceased as he lay down.

Mr. Bell was stunned by the shock; and only recovered when the time came for being angry at every suggestion of his man’s.

’A coroner’s inquest?  Pooh.  You don’t think I poisoned him!  Dr. Forbes says it is just the natural end of a heart complaint.  Poor old Hale!  You wore out that tender heart of yours before its time.  Poor old friend! how he talked of his——­Wallis, pack up a carpet-bag for me in five minutes.  Here have I been talking.  Pack it up, I say.  I must go to Milton by the next train.’

The bag was packed, the cab ordered, the railway reached, in twenty minutes from the moment of this decision.  The London train whizzed by, drew back some yards, and in Mr. Bell was hurried by the impatient guard.  He threw himself back in his seat, to try, with closed eyes, to understand how one in life yesterday could be dead to-day; and shortly tears stole out between his grizzled eye-lashes, at the feeling of which he opened his keen eyes, and looked as severely cheerful as his set determination could make him.  He was not going to blubber before a set of strangers.  Not he!

There was no set of strangers, only one sitting far from him on the same side.  By and bye Mr. Bell peered at him, to discover what manner of man it was that might have been observing his emotion; and behind the great sheet of the outspread ‘Times,’ he recognised Mr. Thornton.

‘Why, Thornton! is that you?’ said he, removing hastily to a closer proximity.  He shook Mr. Thornton vehemently by the hand, until the gripe ended in a sudden relaxation, for the hand was wanted to wipe away tears.  He had last seen Mr. Thornton in his friend Hale’s company.

’I’m going to Milton, bound on a melancholy errand.  Going to break to Hale’s daughter the news of his sudden death!’

‘Death!  Mr. Hale dead!’

’Ay; I keep saying it to myself, “Hale is dead!” but it doesn’t make it any the more real.  Hale is dead for all that.  He went to bed well, to all appearance, last night, and was quite cold this morning when my servant went to call him.’

‘Where?  I don’t understand!’

’At Oxford.  He came to stay with me; hadn’t been in Oxford this seventeen years—­and this is the end of it.’

Not one word was spoken for above a quarter of an hour.  Then Mr. Thornton said: 

‘And she!’ and stopped full short.