Therefore, while such a fine combination of athlete and thinker could scarce have fallen to the poor standard of the popular novelist’s cataleptic hero, the elder Grier’s revelations had prepared me, by inference, for a wasted and shrunken Karl, a six-foot volcano whose inner fire had wofully consumed the outer substance. Indeed, I may ask what _you_ would have thought if told piteously to remember the manner of Constantine’s death, and bidden to strive and avert a tragedy with a definite date assigned to it. How would such facts look on a life insurance proposal, for instance? Hence, the pleasant voice and outstretched hand of a Karl who had the physique of one of Ouida’s Horse-Guard captains came as an agreeable but nevertheless bewildering surprise. Here was a man whose splendid proportions would attract attention anywhere. He was faultlessly dressed, so far as modern fashion may garb the mere male. He carried himself with the ease of good society. His eager face had the bronze of the open air and the clear texture of healthy living. Altogether, there could be no more astounding contrast submitted to a stubborn intelligence than this fine-looking young man, with his distinguished air, his happy insouciance, and his gray-haired father pleading for a son’s life. “You didn’t expect to see me, eh?” cried he, throwing aside his overcoat and subsiding into a chair. “Poor old dad! I’m a dreadful worry to him just now, and I knew he had some scheme in his mind last night when he kept glancing at me under those deep eyebrows of his. So to-night, when he was late for dinner, I sent a telegnomic ray after him. I was just as glad to see you step out of the train as he was. And you are far more sympathetic. I simply can’t get him to realize that I am unable to control my unhappy faculties at times. He thinks you can cut off the sixth sense as one switches out the light. By Jove! I wish I knew the electrician who could disconnect me!” “I don’t understand you, but I am delighted to find you looking so well,” said I. “From your father’s brief report--” “You expected to meet a most wobegone individual. Well, I’m not. I was never better in my life. But the pace cannot last. Unless something happens, some planet-sent intervention which I fail to foresee, I am condemned like any felon. Was I right in warning the old man of a pending catastrophe? I think so. The news of my sudden death might be fatal to him. Now, at any rate, he is prepared for it.” He caught my critical, not to say suspicious, glance and laughed. Never did a “condemned felon” regard his doom so cheerfully. “That is quite right,” he said. “See if you can detect any signs of insanity. Sir Harley Dresser did the same thing when, to please my father, I went to him. He abandoned the idea, however, and gave me some fever mixture, as he fancied I might have caught a chill after some hard chukkars at polo.” “You have no need to convince _me_ that you are a phenomenon,” I protested.