inconvenience for the sake of something which doesn’t really exist at all. It’s exquisitely comic, I can see. I can see it in the abstract, so to speak. But in this particular case, you must remember I’m not a dispassionate observer. And if I am overcome now, it is not with laughter. It is with an indescribable unhappiness, with the bitterness of death itself. Death, death, death. I repeat the word to myself, again and again. I think of death, I try to imagine it, I hang over it, looking down, where the stones fall and fall and there is one horrible noise, and then silence again; looking down into the well of death. It is so deep that there is no glittering eye of water to be seen at the bottom. I have no candle to send down. It is horrible, but I do not want to go on living. Living would be worse than....” Lypiatt was reaching out for another sheet of paper when he was startled to hear the sound of feet on the stairs. He turned towards the door. His heart beat with violence. He was filled with a strange sense of apprehension. In terror he awaited the approach of some unknown and terrible being. The feet of the angel of death were on the stairs. Up, up, up. Lypiatt felt himself trembling as the sound came nearer. He knew for certain that in a few seconds he was going to die. The hangmen had already pinioned him; the soldiers of the firing squad had already raised their rifles. One, two, ... he thought of Mrs. Viveash standing, bare-headed, the wind blowing in her hair, at the foot of the flagstaff from the site of which Queen Victoria had admired the distant view of Selborne; he thought of her dolorously smiling; he remembered that once she had taken his head between her two hands and kissed him: ‘Because you’re such a golden ass,’ she had said, laughing. Three.... There was a little tap at the door. Lypiatt pressed his hand over his heart. The door opened. A small, bird-like man with a long, sharp nose and eyes as round and black and shining as buttons stepped into the room. “Mr. Lydgate, I presume?” he began. Then looked at a card on which a name and address were evidently written. “Lypiatt, I mean. A thousand pardons. Mr. Lypiatt, I presume?” Lypiatt leaned back in his chair and shut his eyes. His face was as white as paper. He breathed hard and his temples were wet with sweat, as though he had been running. “I found the door down below open, so I came straight up. I hope you’ll excuse....” The stranger smiled apologetically. “Who are you?” Lypiatt asked, reopening his eyes. His heart was still beating hard; after the storm it calmed itself slowly. He drew back from the brink of the fearful well; the time had not yet come to plunge. “My name,” said the stranger, “is Boldero, Herbert Boldero. Our mutual friend Mr. Gumbril, Mr. Theodore Gumbril, junior,” he made it more precise, “suggested that I might come and see you about a little matter in which he and I are interested and in which perhaps you, too, might be interested.”