Before he went to bed he took it up, and this time, at the top of a paragraph, he was caught by five words that made him start.

He stood staring, before the fire, at the "Death of Sir Acton Hague, K.C.B.," the man who ten years earlier had been the nearest of his friends and whose deposition from this eminence had practically left it without an occupant.

He had seen him after their rupture, but hadn't now seen him for years.

Standing there before the fire he turned cold as he read what had befallen him.

Promoted a short time previous to the governorship of the Westward Islands, Acton Hague had died, in the bleak honour of this exile, of an illness consequent on the bite of a poisonous snake.