Mr. Wriford read it all curiously, with a sense of complete detachment. He looked at the photographs of himself, recalling the circumstances in which each had been taken and feeling himself somehow as unrecognisably different from them as the convalescent ward was different from the surroundings shown by the camera. He read the review of the new book, especially the passages quoted from it, recalling the thoughts with which each had been written and feeling them somehow to have belonged, not to himself, but to some other person who had communicated them to him and now had committed them to print. He reckoned idly and roughly the royalties that were represented by the prodigious figures of sales, and realised that a very great deal of money must be awaiting him in his agent's hands. But the thought of the money--the positive wealth to which it amounted--stirred him no more than the glowing terms of his appreciation in critical and popular opinion. It aroused only this thought: the memory that, in the days represented by those photographs, money then also had given him no smallest satisfaction. He had had no use for it. He had had no time to use it. So with success--no interest in it, no time to enjoy it; always driven, always driving to do something else, to catch up. Curious to think that once he would have sparkled over it, rejoiced in the money, thrilled in the triumph. Young Wriford would have--Young Wriford, that personality now immeasurably remote, whom once he had been. Why would Young Wriford have delighted? Ah, Young Wriford was happy. Why? What knew he, what possessed he, in those far distant years, that somehow had been lost, that he had thought, by breaking away and not caring for anything or anybody, to recover, that, now the experiment was over, showed itself more deeply lost than ever before? Where and how had that attribute of happiness--whatever it was--been dropped? ... Lo, he was back again where the oldest sea-captain living had found him and had interrupted him, the paper fallen on his knees, his eyes gazing blankly before him: was there some secret of happiness he had missed? As he mused he was again disturbed--this time by the Matron. It was a Board day, she told him, and he was to go before the guardians at once. The guardians were sitting late and had reached his case; ordinarily it would not have come up till next fortnight; after receiving the Medical Officer's report they attended personally to all convalescent ward cases. The Matron gave Mr. Wriford this information as she conducted him to the Board-room door. "It'll be good-bye," she said, smiling at him kindly as she left him--he was different from the generality of her patients. "It'll be good-bye. You're passed out of the C. W." CHAPTER IV CLURK FOR MR. MASTER I