Also--creeping through all his thoughts, like a wandering breeze in the
dark, stole again and again the chilling consciousness of old age--and of
the end, waiting. He was fiercely tenacious of life, and his seventieth
birthday had rung a knell in his ears that still sounded. So defiant
was he of death, that he had never yet brought himself to make a will. He
would not admit to himself that he was mortal; or make arrangements that
seemed to admit the grim fact--weakly accepted--into the citadel of a
still warm life.

Yet the physical warnings of old age had not been absent. Some day he
would feel, perhaps suddenly--the thought of it sent through him a shiver
of impotent revolt against the human destiny--the clutch of the master
whom none escapes.

Vague feelings, and shapeless terrors!--only subterraneously connected
with the wounded man lying in his house.

And yet they were connected. The advent of the unconscious youth below
had acted on the ugly stagnation of the Threlfall life with a touch of
crystallizing force. Melrose felt it in his own way no less than the
Dixons. Something seemed to have ended; and the mere change suggested
that something might begin.

The sudden shock, indeed, of the new event, the mere interruption of
habit, were serious matters in the psychology of a man, with whom neither
brain nor nerves were normally attuned. Melrose moved restlessly about
his room for a great part of the night. He could not get the haggard
image of Faversham out of his mind; and he was actually, in the end,
tormented by the thought that, in spite of nurses and doctors, he might
die.