Humphrey a cripple! Humphrey to lie on his back all his life! Sir Everard could not grasp the idea, could not collect his thoughts to conceive anything so impossible, could not follow the doctor through the circumlocution in which he tried to clothe the announcement, and at last lost patience. "For God's sake, tell me what you mean! Can you be trying to break to me that my boy--that child who has never to my knowledge sat still in his life--will never have the use of his limbs any more? Speak out, I implore you!" "Never any more, Sir Everard!--never any more." * * * * * * * * * Still he could not realize it, could not take it in. He turned away, and went out into the air, to clear, as it were, the mistiness of his brain, and to bring himself face to face with the words, so as to _force_ himself to understand them. "Never have the use of his limbs any more!" Simple English words--he knew he must really understand them, and yet they seemed to him mere sounds, devoid of any signification. He repeated them over and over again, to see what he could make of them. "Never have the use of his limbs any more." That meant--let him think it out clearly--it meant, that his boy, his restless, impetuous boy, would be chained to a sofa all his life, for ever cut off from all that glorified his young existence--_that_ was what it meant. It meant--for now that thought was beginning to assert herself, each word that was meaningless before, was becoming alive with signification--it meant that all that had been should be again no more--that all that the child called _life_ was over--that all that went to make up the sum of his existence was _gone_--that death in life must be his portion for ever and for ever! For what did the word _life_ mean to Humphrey? Why, the powers of which he was to be deprived were the very germs of his whole existence--the things for which he was, and moved, and had his being. Take them away, and what remained? Life bereft of these, what was it to him? What is a husk from which the kernel has been taken, or a casket from which the jewel is gone? Sir Everard was not a worldly man, and in those moments he did not dwell on the blighted youth, and blasted manhood; he did not think of the earthly career for ever clouded, the hopes of earthly distinction for ever shut out. He did not see that his boy was debarred from every path of usefulness or honor which man delights to tread--alike shut out from active service, and learned profession. Results painful enough in themselves; but it is none of them that have brought that despairing expression to his set, white face. No!