I reached the club just in time to dress for dinner. Strange! I could not bear the thought of being alone--I who had lived for a year at a time a solitary. I dressed in haste, and as I came out my servant handed me my letters--the English mail had just come in, he said. I would have flung them from me, but that the first letter in my hand was in Mrs. Carstairs' writing. With a vague presentiment of evil I opened and read. Nelly was ill, Nelly was dying. Some fool had told her of John Mazarion, and had killed her as surely as with the stroke of a knife. As I read, the lines blurred one into the other, and something seemed to give way in my brain. I rose and staggered as one drunken, and then--and then, strong man as I was, I fainted and remember no more. It was a long illness. I do not know what the doctors called it; but they pulled me through, as they thought. It was another thing, however, that cured me. I remember how, when my brain first righted itself, the awful memory of Mazarion's end came back again and sat over me like a dreadful vampire. Each whispered word of the nurses in attendance on me, each noise I heard, seemed to presage the announcement that my guilt was known. One day I asked the nurse whether I had been delirious, and what I had said. She flushed a little. She was a good woman, and an untruth was hateful to her. Then she fenced: "Oh, one always says strange things in delirium; but you're getting quite strong now, and Captain Paget is coming to see you to-day. It was he who found you insensible, and he has been as good as any ten of us----" "Paget--Paget found me?" She put her finger to her lips and a cool hand on my eyes, and I seemed to fall asleep. How long I slept I cannot quite say, but I became conscious of whispering voices in the room. "There's no doubt about it, and it's his only chance, I think. Just give him the news quietly when he awakes. Yes, he may have a glass of port before." I lay still, but trembling under my covers. It had come at last. Oh, the shame of it! the sin of it!--I a common murderer. It was too much, and I tried to start up, but fell back weakly, and saw Paget sitting by the bed, smiling kindly at me. "Not yet, old man--in a day or so. Take this port, will you?" I drank it with an effort; but it warmed me and gave me strength. "You're to be shipped home in a few days--lucky beggar! Wouldn't mind getting ill myself if I could get leave." I smiled in spite of myself. "That's right. Feeling better, I see. We had another interesting patient also, but he cleared out a week or so ago from hospital. It was that fellow Mazarion. Remember him?" "Mazarion!" "Yes. Fell over the edge of a precipice and on to a ledge of rock. Got his fall broken somehow by the branches of a tree, and the wild raspberry bushes, or he'd have been in Kingdom Come--eh? What?"