He must die, and leave these pleasant things, this goodly room, that future of which he had dreamed.

Another man would lie warm in the chamber he had prepared; another would be Syndic and bear his wand.

The years of stately plenty which he had foreseen, were already as last year's harvest.

No wonder that the sheen of portrait and panel, the pride of echoing oak, were fled; or that the eyes with which he gazed on the things about him were dull and lifeless.
Dull and lifeless at one moment, and clouded by the apathy of despair; at another bright with the fierce fever of revolt.

In the one phase or the other he had passed many hours of late, some of them amid the dead-sea grandeur of this room.