still most likely recover only to sink a
little later on from shame and sorrow; nevertheless from day to day he
mended, though so slowly that he could hardly realise it to himself. One
afternoon, however, about three weeks after he had regained
consciousness, the nurse who tended him, and who had been very kind to
him, made some little rallying sally which amused him; he laughed, and as
he did so, she clapped her hands and told him he would be a man again.
The spark of hope was kindled, and again he wished to live. Almost from
that moment his thoughts began to turn less to the horrors of the past,
and more to the best way of meeting the future.

His worst pain was on behalf of his father and mother, and how he should
again face them. It still seemed to him that the best thing both for him
and them would be that he should sever himself from them completely, take
whatever money he could recover from Pryer, and go to some place in the
uttermost parts of the earth, where he should never meet anyone who had
known him at school or college, and start afresh. Or perhaps he might go
to the gold fields in California or Australia, of which such wonderful
accounts were then heard; there he might even make his fortune, and
return as an old man many years hence, unknown to everyone, and if so, he
would live at Cambridge. As he built these castles in the air, the spark
of life became a flame, and he longed for health, and for the freedom
which, now that so much of his sentence had expired, was not after all
very far distant.

Then things began to shape themselves more definitely. Whatever happened
he would be a clergyman no longer. It would have been practically
impossible for him to have found another curacy, even if he had been so
minded, but he was not so minded. He hated the life he had been leading
ever since he had begun to read for orders; he could not argue about it,
but simply he loathed it and would have no more of it. As he dwelt on
the prospect of becoming a layman again, however disgraced, he rejoiced
at what had befallen him, and found a blessing in this very imprisonment
which had at first seemed such an unspeakable misfortune.

Perhaps the shock of so great a change in his surroundings had
accelerated changes in his opinions, just as the cocoons of silkworms,
when sent in baskets by rail, hatch before their time through the novelty
of heat and jolting. But however this may be, his belief in the stories
conc