It was his house, and he was master of it. He felt in his pocket for a key, and found one. He tried the door with it; but the key was too large. Many thoughts at once confused him, for he was troubled by Pain and Mortality: Pain and Mortality wrestled with his failing manhood, to mount, to ride, to conquer. But they were not in the saddle yet. He was determined to open his own door. He fancied many things at once. That his door had changed, or the key. Of his home and himself he was still sure; but his key and his door had already entered that world where all things common change and mingle, and where some other things, less known, emerge quite fixed for ever. Of his home and himself, he was still sure. His key and his door were already passing; himself and his home were, alas! to follow. As he grated at the door, a faithful servant of his, a woman of the name of Kate Hatteras, heard him, and ran and opened. He would have told her the miracle of the door and of the key, but Pain—now grown into the whole of himself and wrestling hard, a power that knew its aims—Pain constrained him. He groaned, and his servant supported him deftly with her laborious and dutiful arm, and there flashed between them that good bond of long acquaintance, and Charity came into this house and visited its dying master—the first of the last angels. And, after Charity, there came those three great spirits, whose Hebrew names I never knew, but which are called in our language the Design, and the Mercy, and the Justice, of God. Charity and the old servant helped him up the stair, soothing him; he would have still spoken of the key and of the door; he smiled with smiles that were those of a child or of a man in extreme old age. Then his pain returned, and he groaned; for the pain was in the head, where is the citadel of a man besieged. His keep was taken. Once, during that last little pilgrimage, upon a landing, he stopped, and tried to speak some senile syllables. He wished to thank his companion courteously. No one else had been directly good to him and to his dissolving humanity in all these terrible hours; but, in the midst of his attempt, the key returned to him. He mixed the mention of it into his speech, frowned a little, and stopped. “Come, sir,” said that admirable woman, “come along; you’ll be better, sir. Don’t you take on; now don’t ’ee”; for she had been born away from towns, and her duty, her service, her honour, her hard work, and her kind of English, were all one thing. So he took comfort, in spite of his pain, and her help was his support; nor had he any other friend, from that moment until he died.