away muttering a little, between an immeasurable
relief and a now almost intolerable medley of vexations. What WAS
this monstrous web of Craik's? What HAD the creature been nodding and
ducketing about?--those whisperings, that tattling? And what in the end,
when you were old and sour and out-strategied, what was the end to be
of this urgent dream called Life? He sat quietly down and drew his hands
over his face, pushed his lean knotted fingers up under his spectacles,
then sat blinking--and softly slowly deciphered the solitary 'My dear
Sheila' on Lawford's note-paper. 'H'm,' he muttered, and looked up again
at the dark still eyelids that in the strange torpor of sleep might yet
be dimly conveying to the dreaming brain behind them some hint of his
presence. 'I wish to goodness, you wonderful old creature,' he muttered,
wagging his head, 'I wish to goodness you'd wake up.'

For some time he sat on, listening to the still soft downpour on the
fading leaves. 'They don't come to me,' he said softly again; with a
tiny smile on his old face. 'It's that old medieval Craik: with a
face like a last year's rookery!' And again he sat, with head a little
sidelong, listening now to the infinitesimal sounds of life without,
now to the thoughts within, and ever and again he gazed steadfastly on
Lawford.

At last it seemed in the haunted quietness other thoughts came to him.
A cloud, as it were of youth, drew over the wrinkled skin, composed the
birdlike keenness; his head nodded. Once, like Lawford in the darkness
at Widderstone, he glanced up sharply across the lamplight at
his phantasmagorical shadowy companion, heard the steady surge of
multitudinous rain-drops, like the roar of Time's winged chariot
hurrying near; then he too, with spectacles awry, bobbed on in his
chair, a weary old sentinel on the outskirts of his friend's denuded
battlefield.

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