Yet that four days was time
enough for a live man to do a "flurry of work," and he was fit enough to
walk up their backs yet with hobnailed boots, as they said in Kerry when
a man was out for war.

Over and over again this hovering tragedy drove sleep from his eyes; and
in the spaces between there were a hundred fleeting visions of little
and big things to torture him--remembrances of incidents when debts and
disasters dogged his footsteps; and behind them all, floating among the
elves and gnomes of ill-luck and disappointment, was a woman's face. It
was not his wife's face, not a face that belonged to the old life, but
one which had been part of his daily existence for over four years. It
was the first face he saw when he came back from consciousness after the
operation which saved his life--the face of Kitty Tynan.

And ever since the day when he had told the story of his life this face
had kept passing before his eyes with a disturbing persistence. Kitty
had said to her mother and to the Young Doctor that he had seemed after
he had told his story like one who had awakened; and in a sense it was
startlingly true. It was as though, while he was living under an assumed
name, the real James Shiel Gathorne Crozier did not exist, or was in the
far background of the doings and sayings of J. G. Kerry. His wife and
the past had been shadowy in a way, had been as part of a life lived
out, which would return in some distant day, but was not vital to the
present. Much as he had loved his wife, the violent wrench away from her
had seemed almost as complete as death itself; but the resumption of
his own name and the telling if his story had produced a complete
psychological change in him mentally and bodily. The impersonal feeling
which had marked his relations with the two women of this household,
and with all women, was suddenly gone. He longed for the arms of a woman
round his neck--it was five years since any woman's arms had been there,
since he had kissed any woman's lips. Now, in the hour when his fortunes
were again in the fatal balance, when he would be started again for a
fair race with the wife from whom he had been so long parted, another
face came between.

All at once the question Burlingame asked him, as to whether his wife
was living, came to him. He had never for an instant thought of her as
dead, but now a sharp and terrifying anxiety came to him. If his wife
was living! Living? Her death had never been even a