"I come up at ten o'clock as ushal, an' the missus met me at door wi' her finger to her lips. 'He's sleeping, Job,' she says, an' glad I was to hear it. 'I'll go an' lie down, Job, for I'm very tired,' she says, and she looked it, poor thing. 'Knock on my door if you need me, Job,' she says, and she went away. He were lying quiet and all tucked up, an' I sat down an' waited for him to wake up and start again. But he never woke, and when the missus came in this morning she went and looked at him, and she says, 'Why, Job, I do believe he's dead,' and I went and looked at him, and, God's truth, he looked as if he might be. But I couldn't be sure, not liking to touch him, and I says, 'No such luck, ma'am, _I_'m afraid,'--polite like, for we all knows the time she's had wi' him, and she says, 'Go and fetch Dr Dale.' So I just loosed these three couple o' young uns--they're all achin' for a run,--an' I'm wondering who'll work th' pack now he's gone, if so be as he's really gone, which I'm none too sure of. Th' Hunt were best thing he ever did, but he were terrible hard on his horses." Dale hurried into the house and up the stair, and into the sick-room, the windows of which were opened to their widest, as though to cleanse the room of the fire and brimstone which had seemed over-strong even to such a pachyderm as young Job. Carew lay there on the bed, at rest at last, as far as this world was concerned, startlingly quiet after the storm-furies of the last seven days and nights. Dale was still standing looking down at him, full of that ever-recurring wonder at the quiet dignity which Death sometimes imparts even to those whose lives have not been dignified; full too of anxious desire to learn how it had come about. The tightly-clenched hands and livid rigidity of the body suggested a startling possibility. He was bending down to the dead man to investigate more closely when a sound behind him caused him to look round, and he found Mrs Carew standing there. Her face was whiter, her eyes heavier and more shadowy, than he had ever seen them. "He is dead," she said quietly. "One can only look upon it as a merciful release--for all of you. How was it?" "He wanted to die," she began, in the dull level tone of a child repeating an obnoxious lesson. Then the self-repression she had prescribed for herself gave way somewhat. Her hands gripped one another fiercely and she hurried on with a touch of rising hysteria, but still speaking in little more than a whisper. "You know how he wanted to die. He was asking you all the time to give him something to end it. But you could not. I know--I quite understand--being a doctor, of course you could not. But there was something he kept--for the rats, you know, in the stables. And he told me where it was and told me to get some. So I got it and gave it him in his sleeping-draught, and----" "Good God! Elinor!..." he gasped. "... You never did that!"