The woman sat beside him quietly.

She had the fairness and gentle calm of the northern races, so white and light that the daylight seemed to die more slowly than elsewhere upon her pale silver face and the abundant aureole of her hair.
Were they father and daughter or brother and sister?
It was plain that he adored her but that she was not his wife.
With his dimmed eyes he looked at the reflection of the sunlight upon her.
"Some one is going to be born, and some one is going to die," he said.
The other woman started, while the man's companion cried in a low tone, bending over him quickly.
"Oh, Philip, don't say that." He seemed indifferent to the effect he had produced, as though her protest had not been sincere, or else were in vain.
Perhaps, after all, he was not an old man.

His hair seemed to me scarcely to have begun to turn grey.

But he was in the grip of a mysterious illness, which he did not bear well.

He was in a constant state of irritation.