Then she called faintly, 'Paul!' The distant figure came back; and she laid her head upon her husband's breast, while Eustace was gently drawn away by the nurse. Presently, he found himself mechanically taking food and mechanically listening to the low-voiced talk of the kindly white-capped woman who was attending to him. Every fact, every impression, was misery,--these details so unexpected, so irrevocable, so charged with terrible meaning, which the nurse was pouring out upon him,--that presence in the neighbouring room of which his every nerve was conscious,--and in front of him, like a frowning barrier shutting off the view of the future, the advancing horror of death! Yesterday, at the same time, he had been walking along the sandy Surrey roads, delighting in the last autumn harmonies of colour, and conscious of the dawn of a period of rest after a period of conflict, of the growth within him of a temper of quiet and rational resignation to the conditions of life and of his own individual lot, over the development of which the mere fact of his sister's existence had exercised a strong and steadying influence. Life, he had persuaded himself, was for him more than tolerable, even without love and marriage. The world of thought was warm and hospitable to him; he moved at ease within its friendly familiar limits; and in the world of personal relations, one heart was safely his, the sympathy and trust and tenderness of one human soul would never fail him at his need. And now this last tender bond was to be broken with a rough, incredible suddenness. The woman he loved with passion would never be his; for not even now, fresh from contact with his sister's dying hope, could he raise himself to any flattering vision of the future; and the woman he loved, with that intimate tenacity of affection which is the poetry of kinship, was to be taken from him by this cruel wastefulness of premature death. Could any man be more alone than he would be? And then suddenly a consciousness fell upon him which made him ashamed. In the neighbouring room his ear was caught now and then by an almost imperceptible, murmur of voices. What was his loss, his agony, compared to theirs?