"Isn't he allowed to drink?" he could not help murmuring, at the door.
"Yes. At intervals."
He wanted to chastise the nurse. He imagined an endless succession of sufferers under her appalling, inimical nonchalance. Who had allowed her to be a nurse? Had she become a nurse in order to take some needed revenge against mankind? And then he thought of Hilda's passionate, succouring tenderness when he himself was unwell,--he had not been really ill for years. What was happening to Ingpen could never happen to him, because Hilda stood everlastingly between him and such a horror. He considered that a bachelor was the most pathetic creature on the earth. He was drenched in the fearful, wistful sadness of all life.... The sleeping town; Auntie Hamps on the edge of eternity; Minnie trembling at the menaces of her own body; Hilda lying in some room that he had never seen; and Ingpen...!
"Soon over!" observed Albert Benbow in the corridor.
Edwin could have winced at the words.
"How do you think he is?" asked Albert.
"Don't know!" Edwin replied. "Look here, I've got to get hold of his clothes--downstairs."
"Oh! That's it, is it? Pocket-book! Keys! Eh?"
II
Edwin had once been in Tertius Ingpen's office at the bottom of Crown Square, Hanbridge, but never in the bedroom which Ingpen rented on the top floor of the same building. It had been for seventy or eighty years a building of four squat storeys; but a new landlord, seeing the architectural development of the town as a local metropolis and determined to join in it at a minimum of expense, had knocked the two lower storeys into one, fronted them with fawn-coloured terra cotta, and produced a lofty shop whose rent exceeded the previous rent of the entire house.