ood God! was _that_ what his view
of life, and of his relations with his kind was going to be? No! no!
anything but that. He would go away somewhere, he would disappear...
yes, of course, that was what "they" all did. He remembered with a
shudder a man he had known, Bob Galloway, who, beginning life under the
most prosperous auspices, had been convicted of cheating at cards. He
recalled the look of the man who knew his company would be tolerated
only by those beneath him. He realised now part of what Galloway must
have gone through before he went out of England and took to frequenting
second-rate people abroad.

He looked up and found that he had mechanically walked back to Cosmo
Place. He was recalled from his absorption to a more pressing calamity,
as he recognised, with an acute pang of self-reproach, the doctor's
brougham still standing before the door. He entered the house quickly.
There was a sense of that strange emptiness, of the ordinary living
rooms of the house being deserted, that gives one an almost physical
sense that life is being lived through with stress and terrible
earnestness somewhere else. He heard some words being exchanged in a low
tone on the upper landing, and then a door shutting as Rachel turned
back into her father's room. Rendel met Doctor Morgan as he came down
the stairs. Morgan's face assumed an air of grave concern as he saw Sir
William's son-in-law coming towards him, and Rendel read in his face
what he had to tell. There are moments in which the intensity of nervous
strain seems to make every sense trebly acute, in which, without knowing
it, we are aware of every detail of sight and sound that forms the
material setting for a moment of great emotion. As he looked at Doctor
Morgan coming towards him, Rendel, without knowing it, was conscious of
every detail that formed the background to that figure of foreboding: of
the sunlight glancing on the glass of a picture, of its reflection in
the brass of a loose stair rod that had escaped from its fastenings, and
of which, even in that moment, Rendel's methodical mind automatically
made a note.

"I am afraid I can't give you a very good account," he said in answer
to Rendel's hurried inquiries. "He has had another and more prolonged
fainting fit, and I think it possible that his heart may be affected."

"Do you mean, then," said Rendel, "that--that--you are really anxious
about the ultimate issue?" and he tried to veil the thing he was
des