After a little hesitation, they set out once more with a little excusable cursing and grumbling. It was about seven o'clock when at last they laid him down in the hall of the hospital, and departed with unfeigned gladness. Two Hospital Orderlies carried him along a passage and into the identical billiard-room that he had seen from the garden. A Doctor undid the soiled bandages with quick, strong fingers, and bent down to examine the wound with an expression of concentrated ferocity on his face. An Orderly brought a bowl, and the Doctor began to wash the place. It was a painful business, but nothing to be compared to the pain produced by the "prober." They even tried to shave the hair from the affected spot. He bore it as long as he could. But it was too much. His left side shook and trembled. It was too terrible to begin to describe. "It's no good," he said, "it's more than you can expect any one to put up with. You'll have to stop it." So they tied his head up once more, and he was carried upstairs into a bedroom. They lifted him on to the bed, managed at length to divest him of his jacket, turned some clothes over him, and left him. * * * * * In an hour a raging fever had taken hold of him. Only intermittently, during the next three or four days, did he so much as touch the world of realities. The only improvement was his face, which had to a great extent relaxed. Otherwise the pain and the paralysis were the same, and all the time the fever raged within him. Somehow, when he awoke from his horrible dreams it was always dark. And the remarkable thing was that the same nightmares seemed to haunt him with persistent regularity. Always he lay down upon a hillside--nebulous black, and furry. Always too, he had been "left," and the enemy was swooping quickly down upon him. He would wake up to find himself once more inert upon the bed, would curse himself for a fool, and vow that never again would he allow his mind to drift towards that terrible thought again. J.O. double F.R.E? What was it? A Name? Whose? When and Why? He would catch himself worrying about this many times. He would awake with a start, and realise that the solution was a perfectly easy matter. Then he would straightway fall asleep, to worry once again. There was a big vase on a table near the bedside. He took an implacable dislike to it, and longed to shatter it into atoms. "Horrible pretentious affair," he would mutter. When he awoke from his fever, he would always make frantic efforts to hang on to consciousness. To this end he would always call the Orderly, ask the time, demand water or Bovril--anything to keep him a little longer in touch with the world. Sometimes he would see bleared faces looking down upon him out of the dizzy greyness. He remembers being told that "the Colonel" was coming to see him. He never knew whether it was his own Colonel or some A.D.M.S.