ions was Rogers packing my things, and a sudden, awful,
excruciating agony. I lost consciousness, remained for days in a
bemused, stupefied state, which I felt convinced was death, and found
particularly pleasant. At last I woke to a sense of bodily constriction
and discomfort, and to the queer realisation that what I had taken for
the Garden of Prosperpine was my own bedroom, and that the pale lady
whom I had so confidently assumed was she who, crowned with calm leaves,
"gathers all things mortal with cold, immortal hands" was no other than
a blue-and-white-vested hospital nurse.

"What the----" I began.

"Chut!" she said, flitting noiselessly to my side. "You mustn't talk."
And then she poured something down my throat. I lay back, wondering
what it all meant. Presently a grizzled and tanned man, wearing a narrow
black tie, came into the room. His face seemed oddly familiar. The nurse
whispered to him. He came up to the bed, and asked me in French how I
felt.

"I don't know at all," said I.

He laughed. "That's a good sign. Let me see how you are getting on."
He stuck a thermometer in my mouth and held my pulse. These formalities
completed, he turned up the bedclothes and did something with my body.
Only then did I realise that I was tightly bandaged. My impressions grew
clearer, and when he raised his face I recognised the doctor who had sat
on the sofa with Anastasius Papadopoulos.

"Nothing could be better," said he. "Keep quiet, and all will be well."

"Will you kindly explain?" I asked.

"You've had an operation. Also a narrow escape."

I smiled at him pityingly. "What is the good of taking all this trouble?
Why are you wasting your time?"

He looked at me uncomprehendingly for a moment, and then he laughed as
the light came to him.

"Oh, I understand! Yes. Your English doctors had told you you were going
to die. That an operation would be fatal--so your good friend
Madame Brandt informed us--but we--_nous autres Francais_--are more
enterprising. Kill or cure. We performed the operation--we didn't kill
you--and here you are--cured."

My heart sickened with a horrible foreboding. A clamminess, such as
others feel at the approach of death, spread over my brow and neck.

"Good God!" I cried, "you are not trying to tell me that I'm going to
live?"

"Why, of course I am!" he exclaimed, brutally delighted. "If nothing
else kills you, you'll live to be a hundred."

"Oh, damn!" said I. "Oh, damn! Oh, dam