The older man thought many things, as he looked at his big back and body.  He stood with his legs astride, and Penzance noted that his right hand was clenched on his hip, as a man’s might be as he clenched the hilt of his sword—­his one mate who might avenge him even when, standing at bay, he knew that the end had come, and he must fall.  Primeval Force—­the thin-faced, narrow-chested, slightly bald clergyman of the Church of England was thinking—­never loses its way, or fails to sweep a path before it.  The sun rises and sets, the seasons come and go, Primeval Force is of them, and as unchangeable.  Much of it stood before him embodied in this strongly sentient thing.  In this way the Reverend Lewis found his thoughts leading him, and he—­being moved to the depths of a fine soul—­felt them profoundly interesting, and even sustaining.

He sat in a high-backed chair, holding its arms with long thin hands, and looking for some time at James Hubert John Fergus Saltyre.  He said, at last, in a sane level voice: 

“Lord Tenham is not the last Mount Dunstan.”

After which the stillness remained unbroken again for some minutes.  Saltyre did not move or make any response, and, when he left his place at the window, he took up a book, and they spoke of other things.

When the fourteenth Earl died in Paris, and his younger son succeeded, there came a time when the two companions sat together in the library again.  It was the evening of a long day spent in discouraging hard work.  In the morning they had ridden side by side over the estate, in the afternoon they had sat and pored over accounts, leases, maps, plans.  By nightfall both were fagged and neither in sanguine mood.

Mount Dunstan had sat silent for some time.  The pair often sat silent.  This pause was ended by the young man’s rising and standing up, stretching his limbs.

“It was a queer thing you said to me in this room a few years ago,” he said.  “It has just come back to me.”

Singularly enough—­or perhaps naturally enough—­it had also just arisen again from the depths of Penzance’s subconsciousness.

“Yes,” he answered, “I remember.  To-night it suggests premonition.  Your brother was not the last Mount Dunstan.”

“In one sense he never was Mount Dunstan at all,” answered the other man.  Then he suddenly threw out his arms in a gesture whose whole significance it would have been difficult to describe.  There was a kind of passion in it.  “I am the last Mount Dunstan,” he harshly laughed.  “Moi qui vous parle!  The last.”

Penzance’s eyes resting on him took upon themselves the far-seeing look of a man who watches the world of life without living in it.  He presently shook his head.

“No,” he said.  “I don’t see that.  No—­not the last.  Believe me.”

And singularly, in truth, Mount Dunstan stood still and gazed at him without speaking.  The eyes of each rested in the eyes of the other.  And, as had happened before, they followed the subject no further.  From that moment it dropped.