CHAPTER VI

UNKNOWN GUEST Outside in the passage again he looked at his watch--half-past six. He must have stayed there thinking in the library a long time. Slept perhaps? That's what old men were for ever doing, sleeping when they didn't know it. Maybe, just as Alice bounded across the brook or Caesar crossed the Rubicon, so he, on receiving the Manet . . . Anyway he felt devilish queer. Death perhaps. The beginning of an illness, the instant change from a fine, taut body to a trembling, helpless, aching mass of flesh and bon…