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The stout sharp circumspect man looked at me from head to foot and then said: “I’m sorry to say I haven’t seen him.”

“Haven’t seen him?”

“Mrs. Ambient came down to meet me as I alighted, and told me he was sleeping so soundly, after a restless night, that she didn’t wish him disturbed. I assured her I wouldn’t disturb him, but she said he was quite safe now and she could look after him herself.”

“Thank you very much. Are you coming back?”

“No, sir; I’ll be hanged if I come back!” cried the honest practitioner in high resentment. And the horse started as he settled beside his man.

I wandered back into the garden, and five minutes later Miss Ambient came forth from the house to greet me. She explained that breakfast wouldn’t be served for some time and that she desired a moment herself with the Doctor. I let her know that the good vexed man had come and departed, and I repeated to her what he had told me about his dismissal. This made Miss Ambient very serious, very serious indeed, and she sank into a bench, with dilated eyes, hugging her elbows with crossed arms. She indulged in many strange signs, she confessed herself immensely distressed, and she finally told me what her own last news of her nephew had been. She had sat up very late– after me, after Mark–and before going to bed had knocked at the door of the child’s room, opened to her by the nurse. This good woman had admitted her and she had found him quiet, but flushed and “unnatural,” with his mother sitting by his bed. “She held his hand in one of hers,” said Miss Ambient, “and in the other–what do you think?–the proof-sheets of Mark’s new book!” She was reading them there intently: “did you ever hear of anything so extraordinary? Such a very odd time to be reading an author whom she never could abide!” In her agitation Miss Ambient was guilty of this vulgarism of speech, and I was so impressed by her narrative that only in recalling her words later did I notice the lapse. Mrs. Ambient had looked up from her reading with her finger on her lips–I recognised the gesture she had addressed me in the afternoon–and, though the nurse was about to go to rest, had not encouraged her sister-in-law to relieve her of any part of her vigil. But certainly at that time the boy’s state was far from reassuring–his poor little breathing so painful; and what change could have taken place in him in those few hours that would justify Beatrice in denying Mackintosh access? This was the moral of Miss Ambient’s anecdote, the moral for herself at least. The moral for me, rather, was that it WAS a very singular time for Mrs. Ambient to be going into a novelist she had never appreciated and who had simply happened to be recommended to her by a young American she disliked. I thought of her sitting there in the sick-chamber in the still hours of the night and after the nurse had left her, turning and turning those pages of genius and wrestling with their magical influence.

I must be sparing of the minor facts and the later emotions of this sojourn–it lasted but a few hours longer–and devote but three words to my subsequent relations with Ambient. They lasted five years– till his death–and were full of interest, of satisfaction and, I may add, of sadness. The main thing to be said of these years is that I had a secret from him which I guarded to the end. I believe he never suspected it, though of this I’m not absolutely sure. If he had so much as an inkling the line he had taken, the line of absolute negation of the matter to himself, shows an immense effort of the will. I may at last lay bare my secret, giving it for what it is worth; now that the main sufferer has gone, that he has begun to be alluded to as one of the famous early dead and that his wife has ceased to survive him; now, too, that Miss Ambient, whom I also saw at intervals during the time that followed, has, with her embroideries and her attitudes, her necromantic glances and strange intuitions, retired to a Sisterhood, where, as I am told, she is deeply immured and quite lost to the world.