mildewed harmonium in the Hospital chapel, on which he
had once tried to play. When he had spoken, his voice had had the flat,
deadly softness of the exhausted phthisical sufferer's. When he had moved
he had suffered torture: the shoulder-blades and hip-bones had pierced the
wasted muscular tissues and projected through the skin.

"I can't!" he gasped out. "You see----"

A dizziness of deadly weakness seized him. His soft, muffled voice trailed
away into a whisper, blue shadows gathered about his large, mobile,
sensitive mouth, much like that of Keats as shown in the Death Cast, and
his head fell back upon the pillows. Julius had fainted.

"Poor beggar!" said a large, pink man, wearing the red shoulder-straps and
brown-leather leggings of the Staff, to another, a fair, handsome, young
giant who leaned against the opposite door-post, as the chart-nurse
hurried to take away the pillows, and lay the patient flat, and the
shorter of the two medical officers dropped brandy from a flask into a
glass with water in it, while the tall Scot, his finger on the pulse,
stooped over the pale figure on the bed;

"No doubt about his next address being the Cemetery. Should grouse myself
if I was in his shoes--or bed-socks would be the proper word--what?"

Beauvayse agreed. "He looks like a chap I saw once get into a coffin at
the Cabaret de l'Enfer--that shady restaurant place in the Boulevard de
Clichy. When they turned on the lights ..." He shrugged. "The women of the
party thought it simply ripping. I wanted to be sick."

Captain Bingo had also known the sensation of nausea during a similar
experience. "But women'll stand anything," he said, "particularly if
they've been told it's _chic_. My own part, I can stand any amount of dead
men--healthy dead men, don't you know? But--give you my word--a cadaverous
spectacle like that poor chap, bones stickin' out of his hide, and
breathin' as if he was stuffed with dry shavin's, or husks like the
Prodigal Son, gives me the downright horrors!"

Thus they conferred, supporting opposite door-posts with solid shoulders,
until the C.M.O., turning his head, addressed them brusquely, curtly:

"Wrynche, if you'd transfer yourself with Lord Beauvayse to the passage,
myself and my colleagues here would be the better obliged to ye."

"Pleasure!" They removed, with a simultaneous clink of scabbards and a
ring of spurred heels on the tiled pavement.

The Colonel remained, making those about the b