Mr. Winscombe's bitter humour. In the past he had repudiated them with
the utmost scorn. In the past--dim shapes, scenes, that appeared to have
occurred years before, but which in reality reached to last month,
trooped through his mind. Youth had vanished like a form dropping behind
a hill. He looked back; it was gone; his feet hurried forward into the
unguessed future; anxiety joined him; the scent that was Ludowika
accompanied him, an illusive figure. He reached toward it.

He was standing at the foot of the bed where Felix Winscombe lay. The
latter was restless, and complained of pains in his arms, reaching down
to his fingers. Ludowika bent over him, her face stamped with concern.
She regarded Howat with a new expression--narrowed eyes and a glimmer of
flawless teeth: a look he had never foreseen there; but it was impotent
before the thing that was. It had, however, the effect of intensifying
his desire, his passion for her fragility of silk and flesh. He would
kiss her hate on her mouth.

She sat by the bedside, and Howat took a place opposite her. Candles
burned on a highboy, on a table at his back; and their auriferous light
flowed in about the bedstead. The latter was draped from the canopy to
the bases of the posts in a bright printing of pheasants and
conventional thickets--cobalt and ruby and orange; and across a heavy
counterpane half drawn up stalked a row of panoplied Indians in clipped
zephyr. It was a nebulous enclosure with the shadows of the hangings
wavering on the coloured wool and cold linen, on the long, seamed
countenance of the prostrate man.

A clock in the hall struck slowly--it needed winding--ten blurred notes.
Felix Winscombe took a sip of water. A minute snapping sounded from the
hearth. A window stirred, and there was a dry turning of leaves without;