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 himself from rheumatism during the last two winters and seemed to understand.

"Don't tell your aunt," he said. "She'll have them all praying round me and I'll get no peace. But I've got a feeling it's the end. I'm hoping to slip off on the quiet, like."

Anthony asked if he could do anything. He had always liked his uncle; they felt there was a secret bond between them.

"Look after the old chap," his uncle answered; "that is if I go first."

He stretched out a stiff arm and laid it on old Simon's head. "Ninety years old he'll be on the fourteenth," he said, "reckoning six years of a dog's life as equal to one of a man's. And I'm sixty-five. We haven't done so badly, either of us."

Anthony drew up a chair and sat down between the two.

"Nothing you want to talk about, is there?" he asked. The old man knew what he meant. He shook his head.

"Been talking about it or listening to it, on and off, pretty well all my life," he answered. "Never got any further."

He was silent a while, wrestling with his pain.