“What is Markham doing?” said his mother, in a faint querulous tone. “Tell him not to fidget with these curtains. It worries me. I am tired, and my nerves are all wrong. Yes, you can take my cloak, Frances. Don’t call anybody. No one will come here to-night. Markham, did you hear what I said? It is all over. I waited till----” He came towards her from the end of the room with a sort of smile upon his grey sandy-coloured face, his mouth and eyebrows twitching, his eyes screwed up so that nothing but two keen little glimmers of reflection were visible. “You are not the sort,” he said, with a little tremor in his voice, “to forsake a man when he is down.” He had his hands in his pockets, his shoulders pushed up; nowhere could there have been seen a less tragic figure. Yet every line of his odd face was touched and moving with feeling, totally beyond any power of expression in words. “It was not a happy scene,” she said. “He sent for her at the last. Sarah Winterbourn was there at the bedside. She was fond of him, I believe. A woman cannot help being fond of her brother, however little he may deserve it. Nelly----” Here Markham broke in with a sound that was like, yet not like, his usual laugh. “How’s Nelly?” he said abruptly, without sequence or reason. Lady Markham paused to look at him, and then went on-- “Nelly trembled so, I could scarcely keep her up. She wanted not to go; she said, What was the good? But I got her persuaded at last. A man dying like that is a--is a---- It is not a pleasant sight. He signed to her to go and kiss him.” Lady Markham shuddered slightly. “He was past speaking--I mean, he was past understanding---- I--I wish I had not seen it. One can’t get such a scene out of one’s mind.” She put up her hand and pressed her fingers upon her eyes, as if the picture was there, and she was trying to get rid of it. Markham had turned away again, and was examining, or seeming to examine, the flowers in a jardinière. Now and then he made a movement, as if he would have stopped the narrative. Frances, trembling and crying with natural horror and distress, had loosened her mother’s cloak and taken off her bonnet while she went on speaking. Lady Markham’s hair, though always covered with a cap, was as brown and smooth as her daughter’s. Frances put her hand upon it timidly, and smoothed the satin braid. It was all she could do to show the emotion, the sympathy in her heart; and she was as much startled in mind as physically, when Lady Markham suddenly threw one arm round her and rested her head upon her shoulder. “Thank God,” the mother cried, “that here is one, whatever may happen, that will never, never----! Frances, my love, don’t mind what I say. I am worn out, and good for nothing. Go and get me a little wine, for I have no strength left in me.”