He found the room in utter darkness. It had not been entered since the night of Nancy’s coming thither. He groped his way across to the shutters, which he remembered to have closed by request of the examiner after carrying Nancy from the room on that terrible night a week ago. He pulled them open and let in a flood of daylight upon a scene each detail of which reminded him poignantly of the happenings of that night. There lay the chair overturned by Nancy as she retreated before Buckingham. He imagined the circumstances in which it had fallen. There on the polished blocks of the floor, under the table--where it had escaped the eyes of Dr. Beamish--gleamed the blade of his own broken sword, and yonder in a corner, whither it had rolled, the hilt which his nerveless fingers had relinquished when he was struck down. On the floor by the table there was a dull brown patch which he knew to have been made by his own blood, and there were similar stains on the daybed and on the napery of the table, which he guessed to have been made by the blood of Buckingham. Fallen between the daybed and the window, he found the slender dress rapier which Buckingham had used. The Duke had dropped it there when he rose at the end of their grim struggle, and he had not paused to recover it in his precipitate flight. For the rest, guttered candles, withered flowers, and rotting fruits encumbered the table, and the lustre of glass and silver was dulled by a film of dust. On the sideboard stood the array of dainty dishes that had been prepared for that infamous intimate supper which had never been consumed, rotting there, and loading the atmosphere of the room with the evil odour of decay, which to Holles was like an exhalation of the ugly memories they held for him. He flung the windows wide, and spent some time in setting the room to rights, and ridding it of all that refuse. Thereafter he lay on the daybed smoking and thinking, and very listless. And it was thus, in the days that followed, that most of his hours were spent. If he did not regard himself as actually dead already, at least he regarded himself as one whose life was ended, one to whom death would bring a welcome relieving rest. Vaguely he hoped--he would have prayed, but that he had long since lost the habit of prayer--that the infection which he supposed present in this house might claim him for her victim. Morning and evening, and ever and anon throughout the day, he would open his doublet to finger his breast and explore his armpits in expectancy, eager to discover upon himself the tokens of the plague. But the irony that had ever pursued him thwarted now his desire of death as it had thwarted his every desire concerned with life. Living and moving in that house of pestilence, breathing its mephitic atmosphere, he yet remained as immune as if he had been a “safe man.”