"I tell
you, child, the less you know of him the better."
He was not to be moved from this, and would say no more about his son, in
spite of Marian's earnest pleading. The doctor came in presently, for the
second time that evening, and forbade his patient's talking any more. He
told Gilbert, as he left the house, that the old man's life was now only
a question of so many days or so many hours.
The old woman who did all the work of Jacob Nowell's establishment--a
dilapidated-looking widow, whom nobody in that quarter ever remembered in
any other condition than that of widowhood--had prepared a small bedroom
at the back of the house for Marian; a room in which Percival had slept
in his early boyhood, and where the daughter found faint traces of her
father's life. Mr. Macready as Othello, in a spangled tunic, with vest of
actual satin let into the picture, after the pre-Raphaelite or realistic
tendency commonly found in such juvenile works of art, hung over the
narrow painted mantelpiece. The fond mother had had this masterpiece
framed and glazed in the days when her son was still a little lad,
unspoiled by University life and those splendid aspirations which
afterwards made his home hateful to him. There were some tattered books
upon a shelf by the bed--school prizes, an old Virgil, a "Robinson
Crusoe" shorn of its binding.
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