Late that night, through wind and sharp rain-shower, Nicky came back, with Jim, sleepy but unhurt and full of his adventure, before him on the horse.  Archelaus and the child had been found wandering on the moor by Botallack mine, now long disused; Jim was crying with hunger and alarm and the old man babbling of the days when he had worked there.  He was trying to find one particular shaft to show the child, he said.  As it was ruined, with an unguarded lip and a sheer drop in the darkness of some five hundred feet, it was as well that the search for it had failed.  Archelaus was following with the doctor in his trap, said Nicky briefly.  He had seemed as though suddenly broken down, the doctor thought, and would probably never recover.  And, indeed, when Archelaus was half-carried, half-helped, into the hall, he looked, save for the two spots of colour on his high cheek-bones, like some huge old corpse galvanised into a shocking semblance of life.

He was taken up to his room, the one with the four-poster bed in which the old Squire had died, with the wide view of the rolling fields.  And there, it was soon plain, Archelaus would remain for what was left to him of his earthly course.

CHAPTER III

THE LETTERS

A week later there was no doubt that Archelaus was dying.  He had passed the week only half-conscious—­some spring both in the machinery of his splendid old body and his brain seemed as though they had given way together.  He lay dying, and Ishmael, standing day by day beside the bed, looking down on the seamed, battered, gnarled thing that lay there so helplessly, felt a stirring of something new towards Archelaus.  It was not any touch of that irrational affection that very easily affected people experience for those they have never really liked and yet towards whom they feel a warm outflow merely because of the approach of death; neither was it any regret that he had not loved Archelaus in life.  That would have been absurd; there had been nothing to make him like his brother and everything to make him do the reverse, and he was not of those whose values are upset by approaching death.  But his antipathy for Archelaus had all his life been so deep, if not so very violent a thing, that it had hitherto prevented him feeling towards him even as amicably as one human being naturally feels towards another.  This was the change that took place now—­he was not enabled to yearn over a brother, but he was, for the first time, able to look with the detached impersonal sympathy and kindliness of one man towards another whom he has no particular reason to dislike.  A profound pity wrung his heart as he looked—­the pity he would have felt from the beginning if Archelaus had ever let him, the pity which had prompted his forbearance at the time of the bush-beating in the wood.