au that was
stuffed almost to bursting. "What's the time? We must make haste or we
shall lose the train. Do, like a good fellow, cram that heap of things
into the carpet-bag while I speak to the landlady."

At last we were off, rattling through the quiet streets of Bath, and
reaching the station barely in time to rush up the long flight of stairs
and spring into an empty carriage. Never shall I forget that journey.
The train stopped at every single station, and sometimes in between; we
were five mortal hours on the road, and more than once I thought Derrick
would have fainted. However, he was not of the fainting order, he only
grew more and more ghastly in colour and rigid in expression.

I felt very anxious about him, for the shock and the sudden anger
following on the trouble about Freda seemed to me enough to unhinge even
a less sensitive nature. 'At Strife' was the novel which had, I firmly
believe, kept him alive through that awful time at Ben Rhydding, and
I began to fear that the Major's fit of drunken malice might prove the
destruction of the author as well as of the book. Everything had, as it
were, come at once on poor Derrick; yet I don't know that he fared worse
than other people in this respect.

Life, unfortunately, is for most of us no well-arranged story with a
happy termination; it is a chequered affair of shade and sun, and for
one beam of light there come very often wide patches of shadow. Men
seem to have known this so far back as Shakespeare's time, and to have
observed that one woe trod on another's heels, to have battled not with
a single wave, but with a 'sea of troubles,' and to have remarked that
'sorrows come not singly, but in battalions.'

However, owing I believe chiefly to his own self-command, and to his
untiring faculty for taking infinite pains over his work, Derrick did
not break down, but pleasantly cheated my expectations. I was not called
on to nurse him through a fever, and consumption did not mark him
for her own. In fact, in the matter of illness, he was always a most
prosaic, unromantic fellow, and never indulged in any of the euphonious
and interesting ailments. In all his life, I believe, he never went
in for anything but the mumps--of all complaints the least
interesting--and, may be, an occasional headache.

However, all this is a digression. We at length reached London,
and Derrick took a room above mine, now and then disturbing me with
nocturnal pacings over the creak