‘It’s not a vow of poverty,’ said Dacier.

’He’ll find they don’t coalesce, or his children will.  Once the masses are uppermost!  It’s a bad day, Dacier, when we ’ve no more gentlemen in the land.  Emmy backs him, so I hold my tongue.  To-morrow’s a Sunday.  I wish you were staying here; I ’d take you to church with me-we shirk it when we haven’t a care.  It couldn’t do you harm.  I’ve heard capital sermons.  I’ve always had the good habit of going to church, Dacier.  Now ’s the time for remembering them.  Ah, my dear fellow, I ’m not a parson.  It would have been better for me if I had been.’

And for you too! his look added plainly.  He longed to preach; he was impelled to chatter.

Redworth reported the patient perfectly quiet, breathing calmly.

‘Laudanum?’ asked Sir Lukin.  ’Now there’s a poison we’ve got to bless!  And we set up in our wisdom for knowing what is good for us!’

He had talked his hearers into a stupefied assent to anything he uttered.

’Mrs. Warwick would like to see you in two or three minutes; she will come down,’ Redworth said to Dacier.

‘That looks well, eh?  That looks bravely,’ Sir Lukin cried.  ’Diana, Warwick wouldn’t leave the room without a certainty.  I dread the look of those men; I shall have to shake their hands!  And so I do, with all my heart:  only—­But God bless them!  But we must go in, if she’s coming down.’

They entered the house, and sat in the drawing-room, where Sir Lukin took up from the table one of his wife’s Latin books, a Persius, bearing her marginal notes.  He dropped his head on it, with sobs.

The voice of Diana recalled him to the present.  She counselled him to control himself; in that case he might for one moment go to the chamber-door and assure himself by the silence that his wife was resting.  She brought permission from the surgeons and doctor, on his promise to be still.

Redworth supported Sir Lukin tottering out.

Dacier had risen.  He was petrified by Diana’s face, and thought of her as whirled from him in a storm, bearing the marks of it.  Her underlip hung for short breaths; the big drops of her recent anguish still gathered on her brows; her eyes were tearless, lustreless; she looked ancient in youth, and distant by a century, like a tall woman of the vaults, issuing white-ringed, not of our light.

She shut her mouth for strength to speak to him.

He said:  ‘You are not ill?  You are strong?’

’I?  Oh, strong.  I will sit.  I cannot be absent longer than two minutes.  The trial of her strength is to come.  If it were courage, we might be sure.  The day is fine?’

‘A perfect August day.’

’I held her through it.  I am thankful to heaven it was no other hand than mine.  She wished to spare me.  She was glad of her Tony when the time came.  I thought I was a coward—­I could have changed with her to save her; I am a strong woman, fit to submit to that work.  I should not have borne it as she did.  She expected to sink under it.  All her dispositions were made for death-bequests to servants and to . . . to friends:  every secret liking they had, thought of!’