When Captain Paul Harris had set his course to France with a slow, long voyage ahead, his shanghaied passenger had gone from stunned unconsciousness into the longer and more complicated helplessness of brain-fever. There was a brushing of shoulders with death. There were fever and unconsciousness and delirium, and through each phase Dr. Cornish, late of the Foreign Legion, brought his patient with studious care--through all, that is, save the brain fog. Then, as the vessel drew to the end of the voyage, the physical illness appeared to be conquered, yet the awakening had been only that of nerves and bodily organs. The center of life, the mind, was as remote and incommunicable as though the thought nerves had been paralyzed. Saxon was like a country whose outer life is normal, but whose capital is cut off and whose government is supine. The physician, studying with absorbed interest, struggled to complete the awakening. Unless it should be complete, it were much better that the man had died, for, when the vessel dropped her anchor at Havre, the captain led ashore a man who in the parlance of the peasants was a poor "innocent," a human blank-book in a binding once handsome, now worn, with nothing inscribed on its pages. For a time, the physician and skipper were puzzled as to the next step. The physician was confident that the eyes, which gazed blankly out from a face now bearded and emaciated, would eventually regain their former light of intelligence. He did not believe that this helpless creature--who had been, when he first saw him in Puerto Frio, despite blood-discolored face and limp unconsciousness, so perfect a figure of a man--had passed into permanent darkness. The light would again dawn, possibly at first in fitful waverings and flashes through the fog. If only there could be some familiar scene or thing to suggest the past! But, unfortunately, all that lay across the world. So, they decided to take him to Paris, and ensconce him in Captain Harris' modest lodgings in the _Rue St. Jacques_, and, inasmuch as the captain's lodgings were shared by no one, and his landlady was a kindly soul, Dr. Cornish also resolved to go there. For a few weeks, the sailor was to be home from the sea, and meant to spend his holiday in the capital. As for the physician, he was just now unattached. He had hoped to be in charge of a government's work of health and sanitation. Instead, he was idle, and could afford to remain and study an unusual condition. He certainly could not abandon this anonymous creature whom fate had thrust upon his keeping. Now, six weeks after his accident, Saxon sat alone in the modest apartment of the lodgings in the _Rue St. Jacques_. Since his arrival in Paris, the walls of that room and the court in the center of the house had been the boundaries of his world. He had not seen beyond them. He had been physically weak and languid, mentally void. They had attempted to