“Oh, dear! oh, dear! Whatever shall I do? She is going ... she is going.... I can do nothing!” Her thin body in the dusk flitted like a ghost about the room and then she was gone. The doctor's pony cart came rattling up to the door. The fussy little man got out and stamped in the hall, and then disappeared upstairs. There was a long pause during which there was no sound. Then the door was opened and his aunt was there. “You must come at once ... she wants you.” The doctor, his father, and Mrs. Trussit were there in the room, but he was only conscious of the great white bed with the candles about it and the white vases, like eyes, watching him. As he entered the room there was a faint cry, “Peter.” He had crossed to her, and her arms were about his shoulders and her mouth was pressed against his; she fell back, with a little sigh, dead. V In the darkened dining-room, later, his father stood in the doorway with a candle in his hand, and above it his white face and short black hair shone as though carved from marble. Peter came from the window towards him. His father said: “You killed her by going to her.” Peter answered: “All these years you have been killing her!” CHAPTER IX THE THREE WESTCOTTS I The day crept, strangely and mysteriously, to its close. Peter, dulled by misery, sat opposite his grandfather in the dining-room without moving, conscious of the heavy twilight that the dark blinds flung about the room, feeling the silence that was only accentuated by the old man's uneasy “clack-clack” in his sleep and the clock's regular ticking. The unhappiness that had been gradually growing about him since his last term at Dawson's, was now all about him with the strength and horrible appearance of some unholy giant. It was indeed with some consciousness of Things that were flinging their shadows on the horizon and were not as yet fully visible to him that he sat there. That evening at Stephen's farm, realised only faintly at the time, hung before him now as a vivid induction or prologue to the later terrors. He was doomed--so he felt in that darkened and mysterious room--to a terrible time and horrors were creeping upon him from every side. “Clack-clack” went his grandfather beneath the rugs, as the cactus plant rattled in the window and the silence through the stairs and passages of the house crept in folds about the room.