They strolled on together in silence. Robert was not inclined to discuss the matter. But old Meyrick seemed to be laboring under some suppressed emotion, and presently he began upon his own experiences as a doctor of the Wendover family. He had already broached the subject more or less vaguely with Robert. Now, however, he threw his medical reserve, generally his strongest characteristic, to the winds. He insisted on telling his companion, who listened reluctantly, the whole miserable and ghastly story of the old Squire’s suicide. He described the heir’s summons, his arrival just in time for the last scene with all its horrors, and that mysterious condition of the Squire for some months afterward, when no one, not even Mrs. Darcy, had been admitted to the Hall, and old Meyrick, directed at intervals by a great London doctor, had been the only spectator of Roger Wendover’s physical and mental breakdown, the only witness of that dark consciousness of inherited fatality which at that period of his life not even the Squire’s iron will had been able wholly to conceal. Robert, whose attention was inevitably roused after a while, found himself with some curiosity realizing the Squire from another man’s totally different point of view. Evidently Meyrick had seen him at such moments as wring from the harshest nature whatever grains of tenderness, of pity, or of natural human weakness may be in it. And it was clear, too, that the Squire, conscious perhaps of a shared secret, and feeling a certain soothing influence in the _naïveté_ and simplicity of the old man’s sympathy, had allowed himself at times, in the years succeeding that illness of his, an amount of unbending in Meyrick’s presence, such as probably no other mortal had ever witnessed in him since his earliest youth. And yet how childish the old man’s whole mental image of the Squire was after all! What small account it made of the subtleties, the gnarled intricacies and contradictions of such a character! Horror at his father’s end, and dread of a like fate for himself! Robert did not know very much of the Squire, but he knew enough to feel sure that this confiding, indulgent theory of Meyrick’s was ludicrously far from the mark as an adequate explanation of Mr. Wendover’s later life. Presently Meyrick became aware of the sort of tacit resistance which his companion’s mind was opposing to his own. He dropped the wandering narrative he was busy upon with a sigh. ‘Ah well, I dare say it’s hard, it’s hard,’ he said with patient acquiescence in his voice, ‘to believe a man can’t help himself. I dare say we doctors get to muddle up right and wrong. But if ever there was a man sick in mind--for all his book learning they talk about--and sick in soul, that man is the Squire.’