, but only circled and prowled the more within his
high cage, only watched the more from his tenth story the rage of the
elements.

In the afternoon he had a doctor--the caravanserai, which supplied
everything in quantities, had one for each group of so many rooms--just
in order to be assured that he was _grippe_ enough for anything. What
his visitor, making light of his attack, perversely told him was that
he was, much rather, "blue" enough, and from causes doubtless known
to himself--which didn't come to the same thing; but he "gave him
something," prescribed him warmth and quiet and broth and courage,
and came back the next day as to readminister this last dose. He then
pronounced him better, and on Saturday pronounced him well--all the more
that the storm had abated and the snow had been dealt with as New York,
at a push, knew how to deal with things. Oh, how New York knew how to
deal--to deal, that is, with other accumulations lying passive to its
hand--was exactly what Mark now ached with his impression of; so that,
still threshing about in this consciousness, he had on the Saturday
come near to breaking out as to what was the matter with him. The
Doctor brought in somehow the air of the hotel--which, cheerfully
and conscientiously, by his simple philosophy, the good man wished to
diffuse; breathing forth all the echoes of other woes and worries and
pointing the honest moral that, especially with such a thermometer,
there were enough of these to go round.

Our sufferer, by that time, would have liked to tell some one;
extracting, to the last acid strain of it, the full strength of his
sorrow, taking it all in as he could only do by himself and with the
conditions favourable at least to this, had been his natural first need.
But now, he supposed, he _must_ be better; there was something of his
heart's heaviness he wanted so to give out. He had rummaged forth on the
Thursday night half a dozen old photographs stuck into a leather frame,
a small show-case that formed part of his usual equipage of travel--he
mostly set it up on a table when he stayed anywhere long enough; and in
one of the neat gilt-edged squares of this convenient portable array,
as familiar as his shaving-glass or the hair-brushes, of backs and
monograms now so beautifully toned and wasted, long ago given him by his
mother, Phil Blood-good handsomely faced him. Not contemporaneous, and
a little faded, but so saying what it said only the more dreadf