y and vainly. It was
extraordinary--he saw it now for the first time--he loved this man. If
it had been in his power, he would at that moment have anointed him with
kindness.

The doctor found himself standing in front of the untidy writing desk,
littered like a recent battlefield. The photograph of the American girl
drew his eyes. What had happened? Was there not perhaps some word for
her? He turned about as if to enquire of the dying man and found Sir
Richmond's eyes open and regarding him. In them he saw an expression he
had seen there once or twice before, a faint but excessively irritating
gleam of amusement.

"Oh!--WELL!" said Dr. Martineau and turned away. He went to the window
and stared out as his habit was.

Sir Richmond continued to smile dimly at the doctor's back until his
eyes closed again.

It was their last exchange. Sir Richmond died that night in the small
hours, so quietly that for some time the night nurse did not observe
what had happened. She was indeed roused to that realization by the
ringing of the telephone bell in the adjacent study.

Section 5

For a long time that night Dr. Martineau had lain awake unable to sleep.
He was haunted by the figure of Sir Richmond lying on his uncomfortable
little bed in his big bedroom and by the curious effect of loneliness
produced by the nocturnal desk and by the evident dread felt by Sir
Richmond of any death-bed partings. He realized how much this man, who
had once sought so feverishly for intimacies, had shrunken back upon
himself, how solitary his motives had become, how rarely he had taken
counsel with anyone in his later years. His mind now dwelt apart. Even
if people came about him he would still be facing death alone.

And so it seemed he meant to slip out of life, as a man might slip
out of a crowded assembly, unobserved. Even now he might be going. The
doctor recalled how he and Sir Richmond had talked of the rage of life
in a young baby, how we drove into life in a sort of fury, how that rage
impelled us to do this and that, how we fought and struggled until the
rage spent itself and was gone. That eddy of rage that was Sir Richmond
was now perhaps very near its end. Presently it would fade and cease,
and the stream that had made it and borne it would know it no more.

Dr. Martineau's thoughts relaxed and passed into the picture land of
dreams. He saw the figure of Sir Richmond, going as it were away from
him along a narrow path, a path t