Dale was confronted with the problem with which every medical man comes face to face during his career. Here was a man who, both for his own sake and still more for the sake of those about him, would be very much better dead than living; who wanted to die, and, as he believed, make an end; who begged constantly for the relief of death;--and yet, against his own equally strong feeling of what would be best for all concerned, his doctor must do his very utmost to keep his patient alive and all about him in torment. Wulfrey wished, as devoutly as the more immediate sufferers, that he would die. He wished it more ardently each time he saw Mrs Carew, and wholly and entirely on her account. Her white face, which grew more deathly white each day, and her woful eyes, which grew ever more despairing in their shadowy rings, were sure indexes of what she was passing through. Dale wondered how much longer she would be able to stand it. He gave her tonics, and his most helpful sympathy and encouragement. And at the same time, by the irony of circumstance and the claims of his profession, he must do everything in his power to perpetuate the burden under which she was breaking. But the whole matter came to a sudden and unlooked for end, on the seventh day after the accident. Wulfrey was hastening up to the Hall to clear this, the unpleasantest item, out of his day's work, when he met young Job coming down the drive with a straw in his mouth and three couples of young hounds at his heels. "Wur comen fur you, Doctor," said young Job. "He's dead." "Dead?" jerked the Doctor in very great surprise, for his patient had been more venomously alive than ever the night before. "Ay--dead. An' a good thing too, say I, and so too says everyone that's heard it." "But what took him, Job? He was going on all right last night." "'Twere the Devil I expecs, Doctor, if you ask me straight. He were getten too strampageous to live. Th' air were so full o' fire and brimstone with his curses, it weren't safe. 'Twere like bein' under a tree wi' th' leeghtnin' playin' all round." "And Mrs Carew? ... Who was with him when he died? Tell me all you know about it," as they hurried along.