rning by painful experience that
fever-patches are best avoided, and finding out what dust-winds mean to
the man who has got sick lungs, and sometimes thinking he was getting
better, and would be one day able to go back to the Clergy House, and take
up his mission in the West and West-Central districts, and begin work
again.

Now, lying panting on his pillows, raised high by the light chair slipped
in behind them, hospital-fashion, he looked beyond the whitewashed walls
northwards, to grimy London. He dreamed, while the chart-nurse was still
apologising about the forgotten breakfast, of the High Ritual in the
sacred place, and the solemn joy of the vested celebrant of the
Eucharistic Sacrifice. The incense rose in clouds to the gilded, diapered
roof, the organ pealed ... then the ward seemed to fill with men in khaki
Service dress, keen-eyed and tan-faced beings, of quiet movements and
well-bred gestures, obviously stamped with the _cachet_ of authority.
Upright, alert, well-knit, and strong, the visitors exhaled the compound
fragrance of healthy virility, clean linen, and excellent cigars; and the
poor sufferer yielded to a pang of envy as he looked at them, standing
about his bed, and thought of that resting-place even narrower, in which
his wasted body must soon lie. And then he mentally smote his breast and
repented. What was he, the unworthy servant of Heaven, that he should dare
to oppose the Holy Will?

"Weel now, and how are we the day?" said the Chief Medical Officer,
presented by the Resident Surgeon to the occupant of the bed. He read
approaching death in the sunken face against the pillows, and in the
feeble pulse as he touched the skeleton wrist, and the Resident Surgeon,
catching the Scotsman's eye, shook his head slightly, imparting
information that was not needed.

"It is not in my power, I am afraid, sir, to return you the conventional
answer," said Julius Fraithorn. "To be plain and brief, I am suffering
from tuberculous lung-disease, and I am advised that I have not many days
to live."

He smiled gratefully at the Resident Surgeon.

"Everything that can be done for me here is done. I cannot be too
thankful. But I should have liked--I should have wished to have been
spared to return to England, if not to live a little longer among my
friends, at least to ..." He broke off panting, and his rattling breaths
seemed to shake him. He sounded like Indian corn shaken in a gunny-bag; he
wheezed like the