One morning, at the end of a cold March, they found him dead in bed, propped on his pillows, with his eyes wide open. Doctors, hastily called in, decided that he had died from failure of heart action, and fixed the hour of death at anything from two to four; by the appearance of his staring pupils they judged that something must have frightened him. No one had heard a noise, no one could find a sign of anything alarming; so no one could explain why he, who seemed so well preserved, should thus have suddenly collapsed. To his own family he had never told the fact, that every night he woke between the hours of two and four, to meet a row of owls squatting on the foot-rail of his bed--he was, no doubt, ashamed of it. He had revealed much of his religious feeling, but not the real depth of it; not the way his deity of money had seized on his imagination; not his nightly struggles with the terrors of his spirit, nor the hours of anguish spent, when vitality was low, trying to escape the company of doubts. No one had heard the fluttering of his heart, which, beginning many years ago, just as a sort of pleasant habit to occupy his wakeful minutes in the dark, had grown to be like the beating of a hammer on soft flesh. No one had guessed, he least of all, the stroke of irony that Nature had prepared to avenge the desecration of her law of balance. She had watched his worship from afar, and quietly arranged that by his worship he should be destroyed; careless, indeed, what god he served, knowing only that he served too much. They brought the eldest of his little grandsons in. He stood a long time looking, then asked if he might touch the cheek. Being permitted, he kissed his little finger-tip and laid it on the old man’s whisker. When he was led away and the door closed, he asked if “Granddy” were “quite safe”; and twice again that evening he asked this question. In the early light next morning, before the house was up, the under-housemaid saw a white thing on the mat before the old man’s door. She went, and stooping down, examined it. It was the little china dog. PROGRESS IX PROGRESS Motor cars were crossing the Downs to Goodwood Races. Slowly they mounted, sending forth an oily reek, a jerky grinding sound; and a cloud of dust hung over the white road. Since ten o’clock they had been mounting, one by one, freighted with the pale conquerors of time and space. None paused on the top of the green heights, but with a convulsive shaking leaped, and glided swiftly down; and the tooting of their valves and the whirring of their wheels spread on either hand along the hills. But from the clump of beech-trees on the very top nothing of their progress could be heard, and nothing seen; only a haze of dust trailing behind them like a hurried ghost.