CHAPTER XIII.


The news was true. The life--the one fragile life--that had been
used as a measuring-tape of time by law, was in danger of being
frayed away. It was the last of a group of lives which had served
this purpose, at the end of whose breathings the small homestead
occupied by South himself, the larger one of Giles Winterborne,
and half a dozen others that had been in the possession of various
Hintock village families for the previous hundred years, and were
now Winterborne's, would fall in and become part of the
encompassing estate.

Yet a short two months earlier Marty's father, aged fifty-five
years, though something of a fidgety, anxious being, would have
been looked on as a man whose existence was so far removed from
hazardous as any in the parish, and as bidding fair to be
prolonged for another quarter of a century.

Winterborne walked up and down his garden next day thinking of the
contingency. The sense that the paths he was pacing, the cabbage-
plots, the apple-trees, his dwelling, cider-cellar, wring-house,
stables, and weathercock, were all slipping away over his head and
beneath his feet, as if they were painted on a magic-lantern
slide, was curious. In spite of John South's late indisposition
he had not anticipated danger. To inquire concerning his health
had been to show less sympathy than to remain silent, considering