"And behold at evening-tide trouble; and before the morning he is
not. This is the portion of them that spoil us, and the lot of them
that rob us."

The sick man put up his hand, motioning for silence, and Pierre, leaving
the Bible open, laid it at his side. Then he fell to studying the figure
on the couch. The body, though reduced by a sudden illness, had an
appearance of late youth, a firmness of mature manhood; but the hair was
grey, the beard was grizzled, and the face was furrowed and seamed as
though the man had lived a long, hard life. The body seemed thirty years
old, the head sixty; the man's exact age was forty-five. His most
singular characteristic was a fine, almost spiritual intelligence, which
showed in the dewy brightness of the eye, in the lighted face, in the
cadenced definiteness of his speech. One would have said, knowing nothing
of him, that he was a hermit; but again, noting the firm, graceful
outlines of his body, that he was a soldier. Within the past twenty-four
hours he had had a fight for life with one of the terrible "colds" which,
like an unstayed plague, close up the courses of the body, and carry a
man out of the hurly-burly, without pause to say how much or how little
he cares to go.

Pierre, whose rude skill in medicine was got of hard experiences here and
there, had helped him back into the world again, and was himself now a
little astonished at acting as Scripture reader to a Protestant invalid.
Still, the Bible was like his childhood itself, always with him in
memory, and Old Testament history was as wine to his blood. The lofty
tales sang in his veins: of primitive man, adventure, mysterious and
exalted romance. For nearly an hour, with absorbing interest, he had read
aloud from these ancient chronicles to Fawdor, who held this Post of the