Gently he sank towards the grave, and as he sank his soul seemed to retire farther within, vanishing on the way to the deeper life.  They thought he lost interest in life:  it was but that the brightness drew him from the glimmer.  Every now and then, however, he would come forth from his inner chamber, and standing in his open door look out upon his friends, and tell them what he had seen.

The winter drew on.  But first November came, with its ’saint Martin’s summer, halcyon days’ and the old man revived a little.  He stood one morning and looked from his window on the garden behind the house, all glittering with molten hoar-frost.  A few leaves, golden with death, hung here and there on a naked bough.  A kind of sigh was in the air.  The very light had in it as much of resignation as hope.  He had forgotten that Dorothy was in the room.

There was Celtic blood in the marquis, and at times his thoughts took shapes that hardly belonged to the Teuton.

‘Cometh my youth hither again?’ he murmured.  ’As a stranger he cometh whom yet I know so well!  Or is it but the face of my old age lighted with a parting smile?  Either way, change cometh, and change will be good.  Domine, in manus tuas.’

He turned and saw Dorothy.

‘Child!’ he exclaimed, ’good sooth, I had forgotten thee.  Yet I spake no treason.  Dorothy, I hold not with them who say that from dust we came and to dust we return.  Neither my blessed countess, whom thou knewest not, nor my darling Molly, whom thou knewest so well, were born of the dust.  From some better where they came—­for, say, can dust beget love?  Whither they have gone I follow, in the hope that their prayers have smoothed for me the way.  Lord, lay not my sins to my charge.  Mary, mother, hear my wife who prayeth for me.  Hear my little Molly:  she was ever dainty and good.’

Again he had forgotten Dorothy, and was with his dead.

But St. Martin’s summer is only the lightening of the year that comes before its death; and November, although it brought not then such evil fogs as it now afflicts London withal, yet brought with it November weather—­one of God’s hounds, with which he hunts us out of the hollows of our own moods, and teaches us to sit on the arch of the cellar.  But though the marquis fought hard and kept it out of his mind, it got into his troubled body.  The gout left his feet; he coughed distressingly, breathed with difficulty, and at length betook himself to bed.

For some time his interest in politics, save in so much as affected the king’s person, had been gradually ceasing.

‘I trust I have done my part,’ he said once to the two clergymen, as they sat by his bedside.  ’Yet I know not.  I fear me I clove too fast to my money.  Yet would I have parted with all, even to my shirt, to make my lord the king a good catholic.  But it may be, sir Toby, we make more of such matters down here than they do in the high countries; and in that case, good doctor, ye are to blame who broke away from your mother, even were she not perfect.’