"Have you seen them?" he said hastily, when he saw who it was. His face was drawn and pallid, like that of a man who has received a great shock. "Who, who?" said Mr Robert, gripping his arm. "It isn't the Squire that's hurt?" "Yes," said Anthony impatiently. "He's in there. Somebody must find Winifred, or she'll be in the thick of it in a minute." "She is at the Cathedral, she and Bessie," said Mr Mannering, asking no more questions, but feeling his heart sink. "They must be coming out about this time. God help them, poor children!" Anthony was off before the words were out of his mouth. Mr Robert, his kind ugly face a shade paler than usual, turned into the shop, which was full of curious customers, and made his way to a back room to which they motioned him gravely. It was a little dark room, lit only by a skylight, on which the blacks had rested many a day, and hung all round with heavy draperies of cloaks and other garments, which at this moment had something weird in their familiar aspect. The Squire had been laid upon chairs, hastily placed together to form a couch; the doctor and one or two of the shop-people were talking together in a low voice as Mr Robert came in, and a frightened girl, holding a bottle in her hand, stood a little behind the group. By their faces he knew at once that there was no hope. Perhaps for the moment what came most sharply home to him was the incongruity of the Squire's fresh open-air daily life, and this strange death-room of his. He said eagerly to the doctor,-- "Can't we get him out of this?" "Not to Thorpe," Dr Fletcher said gravely. "But we can move him to my house. I have sent for a carriage." "Is he quite unconscious?" "Quite. There will be no suffering." There was no need to ask more. Death itself seems as helplessly matter of fact as the life before it. Mr Robert stood and looked down with moist eyes at the honest face that had been so full of vigour but the day before, when the Squire went through his day's shooting like a man of half his years; and then thought of him as he had seen him that very hour, on his way to make peace, comforting a little child. Those had been his last words, the kind, good heart showing itself behind its little roughnesses, and softened as it may have been--who knows?--by a dim foreshadowing. CHAPTER TWENTY FIVE. "Its silence made the tumult in my breast More audible; its peace revealed my own unrest." Jean Ingelow. ------------------------------------------------------------------------