"'And Swift expires a driveller and a show,'" he repeated, in a tone of suppressed agony. "Yes, that is the horror. To become a spectacle—a loathsome object from which even love would shrink away with averted eyes. That is the sting. Facial anæsthesia—every muscle paralysed, every feature distorted. O, for the doomsman to make a shorter end of it all! The face has been spared so far—speech has hardly begun to falter. But it is coming—it is coming. I found myself forgetting common words this morning when I was talking to Dora. I caught myself babbling like a child that is just beginning to speak."
He took up a hand-mirror which he had asked his wife to leave near him, and contemplated himself thoughtfully for some moments.
"No, there is no change yet in the face, except a livid hue, like a corpse alive. The features are still in their right places, the mouth not yet drawn to one side; the eyelids still firm. But each stage of decay will follow in its course. And to know all the time that there is an easier way out of it, if one could but take it, just at the right moment, without being too much of a craven."
He glanced at the table by his sofa, a capacious table, holding his books, his reading-lamp, and his dressing-case with its elaborate appliances.
"If I did not want to know the issue of Heathcote's inquiries! If—O, for some blow from the sledgehammer of Destiny, that would put an end to all irresolution, take my fate out of my own hands! A blow that would annihilate me, and yet spare her—if that could be."
A loud ringing at the hall-door sounded like an answer to an invocation. Julian Wyllard lifted his head a little way from the silken-covered pillows, and turned his haggard eyes towards the door leading into the corridor.
After an interval of some moments there came the sounds of footsteps, the door was opened, and the servant announced,
"Mr. Heathcote."
Heathcote stood near the threshold, hat in hand, deadly pale, grave to solemnity, mute as death itself.
"You have come back, Heathcote?" asked the invalid, with an off-hand air. "Then I conclude you have accomplished your mission, or reconciled yourself to failure."