ether.
His talk was so convincingly rational, dealt with such unreal matters in
so every-day a fashion, that you were ready to think that surely it was
you and not he whose mind was wandering.

'You might reach that pocket-book, and ring for Mrs. Davies,' he would
say in so casual a way that of course you would ring. On Mrs. Davies's
appearance he would be fumbling about among the papers in his
pocket-book, and presently he would say, with a look of frustration that
went to one's heart--'I've got a ten-pound note somewhere here for you,
Mrs. Davies, to pay you up till Saturday, but somehow I seem to have
lost it. Yet it must be somewhere about. Perhaps you'll find it as you
make the bed in the morning. I'm so sorry to have troubled you....'

And then he would grow tired and doze a little on his pillow.

Suddenly he would be alert again, and with a startling vividness tell me
strange stories from the dreamland into which he was now passing.

I had promised to see him on Monday, but had been prevented, and had
wired to him accordingly. This was Tuesday.

'You needn't have troubled to wire,' he said. 'Didn't you know I was in
London from Saturday to Monday?'

'The doctor and Mrs. Davies didn't know,' he continued with the creepy
cunning of the dying: 'I managed to slip away to look at a house I think
of taking--in fact I've taken it. It's in--in--now, where is it? Now
isn't that silly? I can see it as plain as anything--yet I cannot, for
the life of me, remember where it is, or the number.... It was somewhere
St. John's Wood way ... never mind, you must come and see me there, when
we get in....'

I said he was dying in debt, and thus the heaven that lay about his
deathbed was one of fantastic Eldorados, sudden colossal legacies, and
miraculous windfalls.

'I haven't told you,' he said presently, 'of the piece of good luck that
has befallen me. You are not the only person in luck. I can hardly
expect you to believe me, it sounds so like the Arabian Nights. However,
it's true for all that. Well, one of the little sisters was playing in
the garden a few afternoons ago, making mud-pies or something of that
sort, and she suddenly scraped up a sovereign. Presently she found two
or three more, and our curiosity becoming aroused, a turn or two with
the spade revealed quite a bed of gold; and the end of it was, that on
further excavating, the whole garden proved to be one mass of
sovereigns. Sixty thousand pounds we counte