Dark as it was, Wolf was conscious that the fellow gave him a look of frigid suspicion as he bowed himself off. “You can send for me if anything⁠—otherwise in a couple of hours,” were his final words as he moved away.⁠ ⁠…

Christie led him then up the well-known staircase. “He is dying,” she said, as they entered the bedroom of Mr. Malakite, a room whose existence was barely known to him. Then there commenced a strange vigil beside the unconscious form of that old man.

Christie herself sat on a chair on the left of her father’s bed; he, on a similar one on the right. In broken whispers the girl told him how her father had fallen backwards, down that narrow staircase, soon after he and she had been left alone.