“I am infinitely obliged to you, sir,” I said. “You have enlightened me on a very important point; and--and I am infinitely obliged to you.” “Not at all,” he said. “Would you mind leaving your name and address?” I hesitated a moment--and gave them. “H’m! dear me!” he said. “There’s a person of that very name a patient of mine. Well, good-morning to you.” Out in the street, I moved on like one in a dream. “Dead!” I thought--“dead!” I stopped suddenly, looking stupidly about me. “Where am I?--Who am I?--Dead!” CHAPTER XV. THE LETTER IN THE BOOK I wanted above all things to be alone; to re-order my disordered thoughts; to marshal into some sort of coherence the fantastic figures which ran riot in my brain. I felt like some stunned animal turning to creep away and bury itself in shadow and solitude. The clack of the train in my head was like the worry of a screw shaft to a sea-sick passenger. I had to adapt all my reflections to its mechanic monotony. I could not detach my thoughts from those regular beats. They even assumed to my mind presently a definite measurement. A thought was exactly three inches long, and the wheels tapped it out, tapped it out to one endlessly repeated pattern. I was horribly, ungraciously apprehensive of running across Johnny Dando in Footover. The vision of his round beneficent face would rise like an obtrusive moon over the troubled waters of my soul. To gain time for self-communion before he learned of my return was my most feverish desire. I was even, truth to tell, wishing the poor dear boy out of my way altogether. There was no longer room in my philosophy for even this gentle _farceur_. But he did not cross my path, and I succeeded in reaching my cold hermitage unobserved. There was no fire in it this doleful evening--no sign of any feminine grace or thought for me. I had to make out my own comforts--lay my grate, provide my own meal. Well, that was nothing new; nor was it any new discovery that a passing indulgence often makes a spoilt content. But I confess I was peevish at having only myself to help myself again. However, I persisted, and, after feeding ravenously on meats I had brought with me, for I was fairly famished, I took a book, haphazard and for form’s sake, from the shelf, lit my pipe, and sat down before the glow to excogitate the moral and practical effect I was called upon to give to an amazing revelation.