A little before midnight the door was softly, and with extreme care, pushed open, and Mr Bethany’s old face, with an intense and sharpened scrutiny, looked in on the lamplit room. And as if still intent on the least sound within the empty walls around him, he came near, and stooping across the table, stared through his spectacles at the sidelong face of his friend, so still, with hands so lightly laid on the arms of his chair that the old man had need to watch closely to detect in his heavy slumber the slow measured rise and fall of his breast. He turned wearily away muttering a little, between an immeasurable relief and a now almost intolerable medley of vexations. What _was_ this monstrous web of Craik’s? What _had_ the creature been nodding and ducketing about?—those whisperings, that tattling? And what in the end, when you were old and sour and out-strategied, what was the end to be of this urgent dream called Life? He sat quietly down and drew his hands over his face, pushed his lean knotted fingers up under his spectacles, then sat blinking—and softly slowly deciphered the solitary ‘My dear Sheila’ on Lawford’s note-paper. ‘H’m,’ he muttered, and looked up again at the dark still eyelids that in the strange torpor of sleep might yet be dimly conveying to the dreaming brain behind them some hint of his presence. ‘I wish to goodness, you wonderful old creature,’ he muttered, wagging his head, ‘I wish to goodness you’d wake up.’ For some time he sat on, listening to the still soft downpour on the fading leaves. ‘They don’t come to _me_,’ he said softly again; with a tiny smile on his old face. ‘It’s that old medieval Craik: with a face like a last year’s rookery!’ And again he sat, with head a little sidelong, listening now to the infinitesimal sounds of life without, now to the thoughts within, and ever and again he gazed steadfastly on Lawford. At last it seemed in the haunted quietness other thoughts came to him. A cloud, as it were of youth, drew over the wrinkled skin, composed the birdlike keenness; his head nodded. Once, like Lawford in the darkness at Widderstone, he glanced up sharply across the lamplight at his phantasmagorical shadowy companion, heard the steady surge of multitudinous rain-drops, like the roar of Time’s winged chariot hurrying near; then he too, with spectacles awry, bobbed on in his chair, a weary old sentinel on the outskirts of his friend’s denuded battlefield.