During these last months Frank’s personality had been very persistently before him.  It was not that he pretended to understand him in the very least; but he understood enough now to feel that there was something very admirable in it all.  It was mad and quixotic and absurd, but it had a certain light of nobility.  Of course, it would never do if people in general behaved like that; society simply could not go on if everyone went about espousing the cause of unhappy and badly-behaved individuals, and put on old clothes and played the Ass.  But, for all that, it was not unpleasant to reflect that his own friend had chosen to do these things in despite of convention.  There was a touch of fineness in it.  And it was all over now, thank God....  What times they would have up in the north!

He heard a gate clash somewhere outside.  The sound just detached itself from the murmur of the night.  Then a late train ran grinding over the embanked railway behind the house, and drew up with the screaming of brakes at Victoria Park Station, and distracted him again.

“Are you ready, Mr. Kirkby?” said the clergyman, coming in.

Jack stood up, stretching himself.  In the middle of the stretch he stopped.

“What’s that noise?” he asked.

They stood listening.

Then again came the sharp, prolonged tingle of an electric bell, followed by a battering at a door downstairs.

Jack, looking in the other’s face, saw him go ever so slightly pale beneath his eyes.

“There’s somebody at the door,” said Mr. Parham-Carter.  “I’ll just go down and see.”

And, as Jack stood there, motionless and breathless, he could hear no sound but the thick hammering of his own heart at the base of his throat.

CHAPTER VIII

(I)

At half-past eleven o’clock Mrs. Partington came upstairs to the room where the two men were still drinking, to make one more suggestion that it was time to go to bed.

It was a dreary little room, this front bedroom on the first floor, where Frank and the Major had slept last night in one large double bed.  The bed was pushed now close against the wall, the clothes still tumbled and unmade, with various articles lying upon it, as on a table.  A chair without a back stood between it and the window.

The table where the two men still sat was pulled close to the fire that had been lighted partly in honor of Mr. Partington and partly in honor of Christmas, and was covered with a debris of plates and glasses and tobacco and bottles.  There was a jam-jar filled with holly obtained from the butcher’s shop, in the middle of the table.  There was very little furniture in the room; there was a yellow-painted chest of drawers opposite the door, and this, too, held a little regiment of bottles; there was a large oleograph of Queen Victoria hanging above the bed,