which,
rightly or wrongly, Noaks supposed to alleviate rheumatism--that same
iron ring which, by her touch to-night, had been charged for him with a
yet deeper magic, insomuch that he dared no longer wear it, and had set
it before her as an oblation.

Yet, for all his humility, he was possessed by a spirit of egoism that
repelled me. While he sat peering over his spectacles at the beauteous
image, he said again and again to himself, in a hollow voice, "I am so
young to die." Every time he said this, two large, pear-shaped
tears emerged from behind his spectacles, and found their way to
his waistcoat. It did not seem to strike him that quite half of
the undergraduates who contemplated death--and contemplated it in a
fearless, wholesome, manly fashion--were his juniors. It seemed to seem
to him that his own death, even though all those other far brighter
and more promising lives than his were to be sacrificed, was a thing to
bother about. Well, if he did not want to die, why could he not have,
at least, the courage of his cowardice? The world would not cease to
revolve because Noaks still clung to its surface. For me the whole
tragedy was cheapened by his participation in it. I was fain to
leave him. His squint, his short legs dangling towards the floor, his
tear-sodden waistcoat, and his refrain "I am so young to die," were
beyond measure exasperating. Yet I hesitated to pass into the room
beneath, for fear of what I might see there.

How long I might have paltered, had no sound come from that room, I
know not. But a sound came, sharp and sudden in the night, instantly
reassuring. I swept down into the presence of the Duke.

He stood with his head flung back and his arms folded, gorgeous in a
dressing-gown of crimson brocade. In animation of pride and pomp,
he looked less like a mortal man than like a figure from some great
biblical group by Paul Veronese.

And this was he whom I had presumed to pity! And this was he whom I had
half expected to find dead.

His face, usually pale, was now red; and his hair, which no eye had ever
yet seen disordered, stood up in a glistening shock. These two changes
in him intensified the effect of vitality. One of them, however,
vanished as I watched it. The Duke's face resumed its pallor. I realised
then that he had but blushed; and I realised, simultaneously, that what
had called that blush to his cheek was what had also been the signal to
me that he was alive. His blush had been