Hilda was listening, with a set, white face.

“Proceed!” said she, and held out the brandy once more.

“I did not give the Admiral any more aconitine after I had taken over the case.  But what was already in his system was enough.  It was evident that we had seriously under-estimated the lethal dose.  As to your father, Maisie, you have done me an injustice.  You have always thought that I killed him.”

“Proceed!” said she.

“I speak now from the brink of the grave, and I tell you that I did not.  His heart was always weak, and it broke down under the strain.  Indirectly I was the cause—­I do not seek to excuse anything; but it was the sorrow and the shame that killed him.  As to Barclay, the chemist, that is another matter.  I will not deny that I was concerned in that mysterious disappearance, which was a seven days’ wonder in the Press.  I could not permit my scientific calm to be interrupted by the blackmailing visits of so insignificant a person.  And then after many years you came, Maisie.  You also got between me and that work which was life to me.  You also showed that you would rake up this old matter and bring dishonour upon a name which has stood for something in science.  You also—­but you will forgive me.  I have held on to life for your sake as an atonement for my sins.  Now, I go!  Cumberledge—­your notebook.  Subjective sensations, swimming in the head, light flashes before the eyes, soothing torpor, some touch of coldness, constriction of the temples, humming in the ears, a sense of sinking—­sinking—­sinking!”

It was an hour later, and Hilda and I were alone in the chamber of death.  As Sebastian lay there, a marble figure, with his keen eyes closed and his pinched, thin face whiter and serener than ever, I could not help gazing at him with some pangs of recollection.  I could not avoid recalling the time when his very name was to me a word of power, and when the thought of him roused on my cheek a red flush of enthusiasm.  As I looked I murmured two lines from Browning’s Grammarian’s Funeral: 

     This is our Master, famous, calm, and dead,
     Borne on our shoulders.

Hilda Wade, standing beside me, with an awestruck air, added a stanza from the same great poem: 

     Lofty designs must close in like effects: 
       Loftily lying,
     Leave him—­still loftier than the world suspects,
       Living and dying.

I gazed at her with admiration.  “And it is you, Hilda, who pay him this generous tribute!” I cried, “You, of all women!”

“Yes, it is I,” she answered.  “He was a great man, after all, Hubert.  Not good, but great.  And greatness by itself extorts our unwilling homage.”

“Hilda,” I cried, “you are a great woman; and a good woman, too.  It makes me proud to think you will soon be my wife.  For there is now no longer any just cause or impediment.”