Nevertheless, this writing will have to be less frequently indulged (if that is the word); there is little sense in paying doctors if you don't take their advice. There have been few physically stronger men than I; especially my strength of finger and forearm and wrist have been remarkable; and I can still bend a half-crown and make a dog's leg out of a thick poker. But I don't pretend that I am the man I was. Separately, my brain and body work as well as ever they did, but they do not always jump together. I don't know whether this is due to the hole Aunt Angela's blackleaded fender made in my skull. It was a bad hole, and I cracked three of Aunt Angela's brown tiles. Perhaps that is the reason why my doctor advised me to get to bed early, and cautioned me about the use of stimulating drinks and heating foods.... Let me see, let me see.... Ah, yes, I was going to speak of that evening. Mercifully, Evie was spared the worst of that shock. So gently and easily that for quite a time nobody discovered it, she had slid off into a faint at the very beginning of that song of Aschael's, and so had not seen my own headlong fall. This saved us from a disaster, for otherwise our little girl would probably not have been born in the following July, not to be welcomed by her father until October came. Indeed, I had to wait till October before I learned a good many things; but such was my state of lassitude that I was able to do so without impatience, and even without much interest, content to be free from pain and to be looked after by those people of Hastie's party. After a time they began to allow me to do little things--superintend the packing of the luncheon-baskets and, as I grew better, to join the guns in the clearing when the whistle went; and Evie, away at Broadstairs with Aunt Angela (who had given up her room in the little "circus"), sometimes seemed part of a charming but not very moving dream to me. You see from this how bad I was.... Then I returned, and the winter in Egypt and Hastie's house in Scotland began in their turn to fade. Apart from my work at the Consolidation, I began to be full of a curiously single preoccupation. I had not brooded on this while I had been away: as I have said, I had not brooded on anything; it merely came back to me as the most natural thing to do, a matter of course. It was the thing that Louie Causton, against what she conceived to be her own interests, had advised that night when I had dined with her at the Models' Club. There was something I must now tell Evie. I think I let it go, vaguely, as "something." It was not that I did not know perfectly well what it was; but those lazy days free from pain among the heather had made that also somehow unreal; I suppose I had worn smooth the thought of it; and it seemed nothing to make a fuss about. It did not even require resolution. It was merely something that ought to have been done long ago. This was my attitude of mind then. I don't say that it is now.