"A bad time?" he said, in a whisper, standing beside the carefully regulated spinal couch on which Marsham was sleeping. "Awful, sir. He was fair beside himself till we gave him the morphia." "Is there anybody sitting up?" "No. He'll be quiet now for six or seven hours. I shall be in the next room." The young man spoke wearily. It was clear that the moral strain of what he had just seen had weighed upon him as much as the fatigue of the day's attendance. "Come!" said Lankester, looking at him. "You want a good night. Go to my room. I'll lie down there." He pointed to Marsham's bedroom, now appropriated to the valet, while the master, for the sake of space and cheerfulness, had been moved into the sitting-room. The servant hesitated, protested, and was at last persuaded, being well aware of Marsham's liking for this queer, serviceable being. Lankester took various directions from him, and packed him off. Then, instead of going to the adjoining room, he chose a chair beside a shaded lamp, and said to himself that he would sleep by the fire. Presently the huge house sank into a silence even more profound than that in which it was now steeped by day. A cold autumn wind blew round about it. After midnight the wind dropped, and the temperature with it. The first severe frost laid its grip on forest and down and garden. Silently the dahlias and the roses died, the leaves shrivelled and blackened, and a cold and glorious moon rose upon the ruins of the summer. Lankester dozed and woke, keeping up the fire, and wrapping himself in an eider-down, with which the valet had provided him. In the small hours he walked across the room to look at Marsham. He was lying still and breathing heavily. His thick fair hair, always slightly gray from the time he was thirty, had become much grayer of late; the thin handsome face was drawn and damp, the eyes cavernous, the lips bloodless. Even in sleep his aspect showed what he had suffered. Poor, poor old fellow! Lankester's whole being softened into pity. Yet he had no illusions as to the man before him--a man of inferior _morale_ and weak will, incapable, indeed, of the clever brutalities by which the wicked flourish; incapable also of virtues that must, after all, be tolerably common, or the world would run much more lamely than it does. Straight, honorable, unselfish fellows--Lankester knew scores of them, rich and poor, clever and slow, who could and did pass the tests of life without flinching; who could produce in any society--as politicians or green-grocers--an impression of uprightness and power, an effect of character, that Marsham, for all his ability, had never produced, or, in the long run, and as he came to be known, had never sustained.