The house was perfectly quiet, save for a tiny shrill continuance of melody that somehow seemed only to pierce the silence, not to dispel it. Rudolph--of all things!--had in her absence acquired a canary. And everybody knew what an interminable nuisance a canary was. She entered the front room. It had been her bedroom ever since her marriage. She remembered this as with a gush of defiant joy. III So it seemed to Rudolph Musgrave that Patricia came actually into the room that had been hers.... A canary was singing there, very sweet and shrill and as in defiant joy. Its trilling seemed to fill the room. In the brief pauses of his song the old clock, from which Rudolph had removed the pendulum on the night of Agatha's death would interpose an obstinate slow ticking; and immediately the clock-noise would be drowned in melody. Otherwise the room was silent. In the alcove stood the bed which had been Patricia's. Intent upon its occupant were three persons, with their backs turned to her. One Patricia could easily divine to be a doctor; he was twiddling a hypodermic syringe between his fingers, and the set of his shoulders was that of acquiescence. Profiles of the others she saw: one a passive nurse in uniform, who was patiently chafing the right hand of the bed's occupant; the other a lean-featured red-haired stranger, who sat crouched in his chair and held the dying man's left hand. For in the bed, supported by many pillows, and facing Patricia, was a dying man. He was very old, having thick tumbled hair which, like his two-weeks' beard, was uniformly white. His eyelids drooped a trifle, so that he seemed to meditate concerning something ineffably remote and serious, yet not, upon the whole, unsatisfactory. You saw and heard the intake of each breath, so painfully drawn, and expelled with manifest relief, as if the man were very tired of breathing. Yet the bedclothes heaved with his vain efforts just to keep on breathing. And sometimes his parted lips would twitch curiously.... Rudolph Musgrave, too, could see all this quite plainly, in the mirror over the mantel. The doctor spoke. "Yes--it's the end, Professor Musgrave," he said. For this lean-featured red-haired stranger to whom the doctor spoke, a pedagogue to his finger-tips, had once been Patricia's dearly-purchased, chubby baby Roger.