od through which
tufts of grass were showing, with arms stretched out, grasping at the
shore, the intruder lay. Old Evans knew well that fur-collared coat.
Often enough he had held it for the Big Doctor. He had no need to turn
the defeated face from its pillow in the broken reeds. He stared down
at the man whom he had hated, with something of pity, more of
cynicism.

"Well, ye wanted Mount Music!" he said, at last. "How d'ye like it now
ye've got it?"

* * * * *

The things that a man has accomplished we sum him up by, and the
things of which he was capable, and did not accomplish, are of no
account, and the net that held him is of a mesh beyond the vision of
most.

Who shall pity the Big Doctor, or blame him over-much? He died in the
fullness of his powers, with his ambitions, as he believed, attained.
He knew himself to be a good son of the Church, a faithful husband, a
successfully-scheming father. What his priest thought of him is known
only to his priest, but we may be sure he regretted him. A jury of his
peers would have approved him in his every action. If the paths that
he had followed were sometimes tortuous, along many of them he had
been guided by the _ankus_ of that mahout in whose directions his
faith had taught him to confide. He had lived according to the light
that he had received, and in his last act he took his life in his
hand, and gave it for another.

For my part, I believe that the Big Doctor viewed with a justified
composure

" ... that last
Wild pageant of the accumulated past
That clangs and flashes for a drowning man."

CHAPTER XLI

In that same wind-wild dawn, Larry awoke, and tried to believe that he
was a bridegroom, and was going to espouse Tishy Mangan in the course
of the next few hours.

"_C'est toujours l'imprevu qui arrive_!" he told himself. That
ancient ditty, "The Yeoman's Wedding," that he had often heard Dr.
Mangan sing, attacked him like an illness, and enforced its galloping
metres on all he did.

"Through the valley we'll haste,
For we've no time to waste!
For it is my wedding morning, my wedding morning!"

The housemaid (that same Upper Housemaid who had spoken of the
riff-raff of Cluhir) heard him, in the bathroom, loudly announcing his
intentions.

"Ding dong! We'll gallop along!" Larry sang, and the Upper Housemaid
said to her subordinate, "What a hurry he's in! Well! Bright's h