The news was true. The life--the one fragile life--that had been used
as a measuring-tape of time by law, was in danger of being frayed away.
It was the last of a group of lives which had served this purpose, at
the end of whose breathings the small homestead occupied by South
himself, the larger one of Giles Winterborne, and half a dozen others
that had been in the possession of various Hintock village families for
the previous hundred years, and were now Winterborne's, would fall in
and become part of the encompassing estate.

Yet a short two months earlier Marty's father, aged fifty-five years,
though something of a fidgety, anxious being, would have been looked on
as a man whose existence was so far removed from hazardous as any in
the parish, and as bidding fair to be prolonged for another quarter of
a century.

Winterborne walked up and down his garden next day thinking of the
contingency. The sense that the paths he was pacing, the
cabbage-plots, the apple-trees, his dwelling, cider-cellar,
wring-house, stables, and weathercock, were all slipping away over his
head and beneath his feet, as if they were painted on a magic-lantern
slide, was curious. In spite of John South's late indisposition he had
not anticipated danger. To inquire concerning his health had been to
show less sympathy than to remain silent, considering the material
interest he possessed in the woodman's life, and he had, accordingly,
made a point of avoiding Marty's house.