Robert bowed his head and asked no more. He sat by the dying man, whose sufferings, although they were a little alleviated by morphia, made him restless. He moaned even in his snatches of sleep, and spoke occasionally—always about the accident. Once he mentioned Agnes:
“Agnes will be sorry when she hears.”
Toward daybreak he turned to Orange, and said quite simply—
“You are different from the rest. You have the priest's element in you; there is an incessant struggle and toil to cut one another's throat among us average men—all striving after success. You weren't built that way. God bless you.”
In the morning his father and the near relatives arrived. The women cried bitterly. The aged peer looked on in stony grief—drinking in his son's scarred faced and glancing, with despair, from time to time, at the clock.
“It isn't going, is it?” he asked.
No, it had been checked; the tick disturbed his lordship, but there was an hour-glass on the table.
“How many hours do they think——?”
“Perhaps ten hours.”
When the sand had run down at the conclusion of the first hour, no one reversed the instrument. But Lady Margaret Sempton, the Earl's sister, sent a whispered message to the Bishop of Hadley, who was waiting, much altered by sorrow and anxiety, in the ante-room. Reckage had asked to see him. He had always liked the good old man, and the rest withdrew during their short interview.