d Paul.

'Oh,' said the doctor, casting a shrewd, good-humoured eye at him,
'you feel like that, do you? But you've got me to reckon with, and the
British Pharmacopoeia. When did you eat last?

'Day before yesterday.'

'All right, young man; I'll fettle you, and if you think you're going to
slip your cable, you're mightily in error.'

'Well,' said Paul, 'it doesn't matter to me one way or the other.'

The time went on, and a day later he was light-headed, and babbled, as
he learned afterwards, of Claudia. Sometimes he upbraided her savagely,
and sometimes he made tragic love to her. He had intervals of complete
sanity, in which the thought of her was like an inward fire; then he had
a five weeks' spell of madness, and awoke from it free from pain, but a
mere crate of bones which felt heavier than lead. He remembered some of
his own delusions clearly, but lost count of whole weeks of time, and
had yet to learn how long he had lain there. When he awoke he knew that
somebody was in the room, and made an effort to turn his head. That
failed, but the somebody heard the faint rustle he made, and the first
face his eyes looked at was the face of Darco.

'Ah!' said Darco, 'you haf got your prains pack again. You know me, eh?'

Paul tried to nod, but succeeded only in closing his eyes in sign of
assent.

'I am a bid of a dogtor,' said Darco; 'led me veel your bulse.
Goot--goot, ant your demberadure is normal. It is now begome your
business to ead and trink.' He waddled across the room, and came back
with a tin of jelly and a spoon, and fed the invalid 'That is enough,'
he said, after the fifth spoonful. 'Liddle and often; that is the came
to blay.'

Paul was too weak to wonder at anything, or he would have wondered at
Darco's presence; but Nature was too wise to let him waste his forces on
any such unprofitable exercise as thinking, and sent him to sleep again.
When he awoke he was ravenously hungry, and in a day or two he began to
abuse the nurse who tended him for stinting his victuals. But the nurse
was a good-humoured old campaigner.

'Why, bless your heart, Mr. Armstrong,' she said, when in an interval
of contrition Paul apologised, 'it do me good to hear you swear that
hearty! Most gentlemen does it when they're picking up a bit.'

There was in his mind barely a thought of Claudia; the one fever seemed
to have burned the other out of him.

'The heart,' said the doctor--'the heart's the thing we're always afra