‘I’ll go upstairs,’ he said, having sighed slightly.

‘May I come and read to you, grandfather?’

‘Not just now, Jane.  Go out whilst it’s a bit fine.’

He went from the room, still with an unsteady walk.  Reaching his own room, where there was a cheerful fire, he sat down, and remained for a long time unoccupied, save with his reflections.  This chamber had scarcely changed in a detail of its arrangement since he first came to inhabit it.  There was the chair which Sidney always used, and that on which Jane had sat since she was the silent, frail child of thirteen.  Here had his vision taken form, growing more definite with the growth of his granddaughter, seeming to become at length a splendid reality.  What talk had been held here between Kirkwood and himself whilst Jane listened!  All gone into silence; gone, too, the hope it had encouraged.

He was weary after the morning’s absence from home, and fell into a light slumber.  Dreams troubled him.  First he found himself in Australia; he heard again the sudden news of his son’s death; the shook awoke him.  Another dozing fit, and he was a young man with a wife and children to support; haunted with the fear of coming to want; harsh, unreasonable in his exactions at home.  Something like a large black coffin came into his dream, and in dread of it he again returned to consciousness.

All night he had been thinking of the dark story of long ago—­his wife’s form motionless on the bed—­the bottle which told him what had happened.  Why must that memory revive to trouble his last days?  Part of his zeal for the great project had come of a feeling that he might thus in some degree repair his former ill-doing; Jane would be a providence to many hapless women whose burden was as heavy as his own wife’s had been, Must he abandon that solace?  In any case he could bestow his money for charitable purposes, but it would not be the same, it would not effect what he had aimed at.

Late in the afternoon he drew from the inner pocket of his coat a long envelope and took thence a folded paper.  It was covered with clerkly writing, which he perused several times.  At length he tore the paper slowly across the middle, again tore the fragments, and threw them on to the fire. . . .

Jane obeyed her grandfather’s word and went out for an hour.  She wished for news of Pennyloaf, who had been ill, and was now very near the time of her confinement.  At the door of the house in Merlin Place she was surprised to encounter Bob Hewett, who stood in a lounging attitude; he had never appeared to her so disreputable—­ not that his clothes were worse than usual, but his face and hands were dirty, and the former was set in a hang-dog look.

‘Is your wife upstairs, Mr. Hewett?’ Jane asked, when he had nodded sullenly in reply to her greeting.

’Yes; and somebody else too as could have been dispensed with.  There’s another mouth to feed.’