"Do you know," confessed Mr. Basket, as he and the Doctor walked homewards, "I felt all the while as if we were composing our friend's epitaph. I have a presentimen—"
"Do not utter it, my dear sir!" the Doctor entreated.
"He was a man—"
"Yes, yes; 'taking one thing with another, it is more than likely we shall never see him again.' The words, sir, struck upon my spirit like the tolling of a bell. But for Heaven's sake let us not despair!"
"Life is precarious, Dr. Hansombody; as your profession, if any, should teach. We are here to-day; we are gone—in the more sudden cases—to-morrow. What do you say, sir, to a glass of wine at the 'Benbow'? To my thinking, we should both be the better for it."
CHAPTER XVIII.
APOTHEOSIS.
At this point my pen falters. The order of events would require us now to travel back to Troy with Miss Marty and the Doctor and break the news to the town. But have you the heart for it? Not I.
I tell you that I never now pass the Ferry Slip on the shore facing Troy, on a summer's evening when the sun slants over the hill and the smoke of the town rises through shadow into the bright air through which the rooks are winging homeward—I never rest on my oars to watch the horse-boat unmooring, the women up the street filling their pitchers at the water-shute, the strawberry-gatherers at work in their cliff gardens; but I see again Boutigo's van descend the hill and two passengers in black alight from it upon the shore—Miss Marty and the Doctor, charged with their terrible message. I see them stand on the slip and shade their eyes as they look across to the town glassed in the evening tide, I see beneath the shade of her palm Miss Marty's lips tremble with the words that are to shatter that happy picture of repose, brutally, violently, as a stone crashing into a mirror. In the ferry-boat she trembles from head to foot, between fear and a fever to speak and have it over.…