e.

"Hammond," I said one day, "I have never yet asked you. How did I give my
evidence at the inquest?"

"Like a doctor and a sane man."

"That's good. But it was a difficult course to steer. You conducted the
post-mortem. Did any peculiarity in the dead man's face strike you?"

"Nothing but this: that the excessive contraction of the bicipital
muscles had brought the features into such forcible contact with the bars
as to cause bruising and actual abrasion. He must have been dead some
little time when you found him."

"And nothing else? You noticed nothing else in his face--a sort of
obliteration of what makes one human, I mean?"

"Oh, dear, no! nothing but the painful constriction that marks any
ordinary fatal attack of _angina pectoris_.--There's a rum breach of
promise case in the paper to-day. You should read it; it'll make you
laugh."

I had no more inclination to laugh than to sigh; but I accepted the
change of subject with an equanimity now habitual to me.

* * * * *

One morning I sat up in bed, and knew that consciousness was wide awake
in me once more. It had slept, and now rose refreshed, but trembling.
Looking back, all in a flutter of new responsibility, along the misty
path by way of which I had recently loitered, I shook with an awful
thankfulness at sight of the pitfalls I had skirted and escaped--of
the demons my witlessness had baffled.

The joy of life was in my heart again, but chastened and made pitiful by
experience.

Hammond noticed the change in me directly he entered, and congratulated
me upon it.

"Go slow at first, old man," he said. "You've fairly sloughed the old
skin; but give the sun time to toughen the new one. Walk in it at
present, and be content."

I was, in great measure, and I followed his advice. I got leave of
absence, and ran down for a month in the country to a certain house we
wot of, where kindly ministration to my convalescence was only one of the
many blisses to be put to an account of rosy days.

"_Then did my love awake,
Most like a lily-flower,
And as the lovely queene of heaven,
So shone shee in her bower._"

Ah, me! ah, me! when was it? A year ago, or two-thirds of a lifetime?
Alas! "Age with stealing steps hath clawde me with his crowch." And will
the yews root in _my_ heart, I wonder?

I was well, sane, recovered, when one morning, towards the end of my
visit, I received a letter from Hammond, enclosing a packe