At length Tom Outram opened his eyes and looked at him, but Leonard knew
that he did not see him as he was. The dying eyes studied him indeed and
were intelligent, but he could feel that they read something on his
face that was not known to himself, nor could be visible to any other
man--read it as though it were a writing.

So strange was this scrutiny, so meaningless and yet so full of a
meaning which he could not grasp, that Leonard shrank beneath it. He
spoke to his brother, but no answer came,--only the great hollow eyes
read on in that book which was printed upon his face; that book, sealed
to him, but to the dying man an open writing.

The sight of the act of death is always terrible; it is terrible to
watch the latest wax and ebb of life, and with the intelligence to
comprehend that these flickerings, this coming and this going, these
sinkings and these last recoveries are the trial flights of the
animating and eternal principle--call it soul or what you will--before
it trusts itself afar. Still more terrible is it under circumstances of
physical and mental desolation such as those present to Leonard Outram
in that hour.

But he had looked on death before, on death in many dreadful shapes, and
yet he had never been so much afraid. What was it that his brother,
or the spirit of his brother, read in his face? What learning had he
gathered in that sleep of his, the last before the last? He could not
tell--now he longed to know, now he was glad not to know, and now he
strove to overcome his fears.

"My nerves are shattered," he said to himself. "He is dying. How shall I
bear to see him die?"