“George, I am glad to see you. I have been wishing for you all day. I think you must have been sent here purposely.”
“Margery sent me. I met her as I was coming from the train.”
It was not to Margery that Thomas Godolphin had alluded—but he let it pass. “Sent purposely,” he repeated aloud. “George, I think the end is very near.”
“But you are surely better?” returned George, speaking in impulse. “Unless you were better, would you be sitting here?”
“Do you remember, George, my mother sat here in the afternoon of the day she died? A feeling came over me to-day that I should enjoy a breath of the open air; but it was not until after they had brought my chair out and I was installed in it, that I thought of my mother. It struck me as being a curious coincidence; almost an omen. Margery recollected the circumstance, and spoke of it.”
The words imparted a strange sensation to George, a shivering dread. “Are you in much pain, Thomas?” he asked.
“Not much; a little, at times; but the great agony that used to come upon me has quite passed. As it did with my mother, you know.”
Could George Godolphin help the feeling of bitter contrition that came over him? He had been less than man, lower than human, had he helped it. Perhaps the full self-reproach of his conduct never came home to him as it came now. With all his faults, his lightness, he loved his brother: and it seemed that it was he—he—who had made the face wan, the hair grey, who had broken the already sufficiently stricken heart, and had sent him to his grave before his time.
“It is my fault,” he spoke in his emotion. “But for me, Thomas, you might have been with us, at any rate, another year or two. The trouble has told upon you.”
“Yes, it has told upon me,” Thomas quietly answered. There was nothing else that he could answer.