a street of the little wooden
hamlet. The door was low; I had to stoop to enter it. I saw in a moment
this was indeed no trick. On a native bed, in a corner of the one room,
a man lay desperately ill; a European, with white hair and with a skin
well bronzed by exposure to the tropics. Ominous dark spots beneath the
epidermis showed the nature of the disease. He tossed restlessly as he
lay, but did not raise his fevered head or look at my conductor. "Well,
any news of Ram Das?" he asked at last, in a parched and feeble voice.
Parched and feeble as it was, I recognised it instantly. The man on the
bed was Sebastian--no other!

"No news of Lam Das," the retired gentleman replied, with an unexpected
display of womanly tenderness. "Lam Das clean gone; not come any more.
But I bling you back Eulopean doctor, sahib."

Sebastian did not look up from his bed even then. I could see he
was more anxious about a message from his scout than about his own
condition. "The rascal!" he moaned, with his eyes closed tight. "The
rascal! he has betrayed me." And he tossed uneasily.

I looked at him and said nothing. Then I seated myself on a low stool by
the bedside and took his hand in mine to feel his pulse. The wrist was
thin and wasted. The face, too, I noticed, had fallen away greatly. It
was clear that the malignant fever which accompanies the disease had
wreaked its worst on him. So weak and ill was he, indeed, that he let me
hold his hand, with my fingers on his pulse, for half a minute or more
without ever opening his eyes or displaying the slightest curiosity at
my presence. One might have thought that European doctors abounded in
Nepaul, and that I had been attending him for a week, with "the mixture
as before" at every visit.

"Your pulse is weak and very rapid," I said slowly, in a professional
tone. "You seem to me to have fallen into a perilous condition."

At the sound of my voice, he gave a sudden start. Yet even so, for a
second, he did not open his eyes. The revelation of my presence seemed
to come upon him as in a dream. "Like Cumberledge's," he muttered to
himself, gasping. "Exactly like Cumberledge's.... But Cumberledge is
dead... I must be delirious.... If I didn't KNOW to the contrary, I
could have sworn it was Cumberledge's!"

I spoke again, bending over him. "How long have the glandular swellings
been present, Professor?" I asked, with quiet deliberativeness.

This time he opened his eyes sharply, and looked