No, there was no change in him. The enigma that had baffled all the specialists still persisted. He was still the living dead man who had been ejected with just one little sobbing gasp of air out of the narrow tunnel, the bore of his own body, by the premature explosion of the mine he had spent six weeks’ labour in laying. On the further side that explosion had blown out the flank of a hill, but he who had stoppered the narrow vent on the hither side, like a plug of damp earth in the mouth of a rifle-barrel, had been softly expelled into the presence of his fellow-sappers waiting at the junction of the wider tunnel they had bored, with never a mark of injury on him. Even his hair, which had been so near--a paltry twenty feet or so--to the charge that had lifted goodness knows how many tons of earth and stone sky-high--even his hair had not been singed. His body, almost incredibly, had come unscathed from its open sight of death, but something--his wife thought of it as his spirit--had been instantly shocked into silence. Since that awful experience he had given no sign of consciousness or of volition. His bodily functions continued their offices with a slow, dull persistence--he was fed artificially now and again to remedy the slight waste of tissue--but his spirit gave no least sign of its occupancy. The specialists had been greatly interested, but he had given them so little material for actual experiment that they had yielded to his wife’s urgent request, and yesterday he had been transferred to her immediate care in the reasonably convenient Maida Vale flat in which they had spent their too restricted honeymoon.... She leant over him now and stared into his composed impassive face, every feature of which was steady with the challenging quiet of death. Where was he? she wondered. What could she conceivably do to reach him through that unresponsive instrument on the bed--an instrument that appeared as useless now as an unstrung piano? And the voice, that had made its immense admission with the desperate gallantry of one who had flung up his arms and acknowledged himself prisoner to the great enemy--whence had come the voice? She could remember no antecedent dream. The sound of his speaking had wakened her, and in the act of waking she had heard his surrender made, as clearly as if he had spoken it with his mouth at her ear. She felt that she could hear it still. That reckless sentence was yet ringing through the room: “_I’m_ dead.” Just so, she thought, might he have said “Kamerad” in face of some overwhelmingly superior force. “But you’re _not_; you’re not dead,” she pleaded to that insensible figure; “you’re alive if--if you would but come back.” She might as well have strummed on the keyboard of a wireless piano for all the reaction she could produce from the lax representative that lay before her, but her own verbal image returned to her with another question.