Also—­creeping through all his thoughts, like a wandering breeze in the dark, stole again and again the chilling consciousness of old age—­and of the end, waiting.  He was fiercely tenacious of life, and his seventieth birthday had rung a knell in his ears that still sounded.  So defiant was he of death, that he had never yet brought himself to make a will.  He would not admit to himself that he was mortal; or make arrangements that seemed to admit the grim fact—­weakly accepted—­into the citadel of a still warm life.

Yet the physical warnings of old age had not been absent.  Some day he would feel, perhaps suddenly—­the thought of it sent through him a shiver of impotent revolt against the human destiny—­the clutch of the master whom none escapes.

Vague feelings, and shapeless terrors!—­only subterraneously connected with the wounded man lying in his house.

And yet they were connected.  The advent of the unconscious youth below had acted on the ugly stagnation of the Threlfall life with a touch of crystallizing force.  Melrose felt it in his own way no less than the Dixons.  Something seemed to have ended; and the mere change suggested that something might begin.

The sudden shock, indeed, of the new event, the mere interruption of habit, were serious matters in the psychology of a man, with whom neither brain nor nerves were normally attuned.  Melrose moved restlessly about his room for a great part of the night.  He could not get the haggard image of Faversham out of his mind; and he was actually, in the end, tormented by the thought that, in spite of nurses and doctors, he might die.

Nonsense!  One could get a specialist from Edinburgh—­from London if necessary.

And always, by whatever road, his thoughts came back—­as it were leaping—­to the gems.  Amethyst, sardonyx, crystal—­they twinkled and flashed through all the byways of the brain.  So long as the house held their owner, it held them also.  Two of them he had coveted for years.  They must not—­they should not—­be lost to him again.  By what ridiculous chance had this lad got hold of them?

With the morning came a letter from a crony of Melrose’s in London, an old Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries, with whom he had had not a few dealings in the past.

“Have you heard that that queer fish Mackworth has left his whole cabinet of gems to a young nephew—­his sister’s son, to whom they say he has been much attached?  Everything else goes to the British Museum and South Kensington, and it is a queer business to have left the most precious thing of all to a youth who in all probability has neither knowledge nor taste, and may be trusted to turn them into cash as soon as possible.  Do you remember the amethyst Medusa?  I could shout with joy when I think of it!  You will be wanting to run the nephew to earth.  Make haste!—­or Germany or America will grab them.”

But the amethyst Medusa lay safe in her green case in the drawer of the Riesener table.