* * * * * When I awoke again, my head was fairly clear, but there was an abominable reek of ether all about me. The moment I opened my eyes, I felt that something had happened. I asked for Sir John and for Alice. I saw a swift, curious look that I could not interpret come over the face of the nurse, then she was calm again, her countenance impassive. She reassured me in quick meaningless phrases, and told me to sleep. But I could not sleep: I was absolutely sure that something had happened to them, to my friend and to the woman I loved. Yet all my insistence profited me nothing, for the nurses were a silent lot. Finally, I think, they must have given me a sleeping potion of some sort, for I fell asleep again. For two endless, chaotic days, I saw nothing of either of them, Alice or Sir John. I became more and more agitated, the nurse more and more taciturn. She would only say that they had gone away for a day or two. And then, on the third day, I found out. They thought I was asleep. The night nurse had just come in to relieve the other. "Has he been asking about them again?" she asked. "Yes, poor fellow. I have hardly managed to keep him quiet." "We will have to keep it from him until he is recovered fully." There was a long pause, and I could hardly control my labored breathing. "How sudden it was!" one of them said. "To be killed like that--" I heard no more, for I leapt suddenly up in bed, crying out. "Quick! For God's sake, tell me what has happened!" I jumped to the floor and seized one of them by the collar. She was horrified. I shook her with a superhuman strength. "Tell me!" I shouted, "Tell me--Or I'll--!" She told me--what else could she do. "They were killed in an accident," she gasped, "in a taxi--a collision--the Strand--!" And at that moment a crowd of nurses and attendants arrived, called by the other frantic woman, and they put me to bed again. I have no memory of the next few days. I was in delirium, and I was never told what I said during my ravings. Nor can I express the feelings I was saturated with when at last I regained my mind again. Between my old emotions and any attempt to put them into words, or even to remember them, lies always that insurmountable wall of my Change. I cannot understand what I must have felt, I cannot express it. I only know that for weeks I was sunk in a misery beyond any misery I had ever imagined before. The only two friends I had on earth were gone to me. I was left alone. And, for the first time, I began to see before me all these endless years that would be the same, dull, lonely.