"To Hungary, I believe. There's a celebrated authority on brain-surgery in Buda-Pesth. The surgeons think it's pressure on some nerve-centre, and the case calls for the particular operation that is this chap's specialty. It's a forlorn hope, I imagine." "I don't know," said the younger man, lighting a cigarette. "They do marvellous things nowadays. And anyway, if it fails, it can't be any worse for the patient. As it is, he has no mind at all--no speech, no memory, nothing!" Echo turned her head; there was a fierce little smile on her lips. So here was another! Had he, too, like the one of whom she had been thinking, been overtaken by a righteous Nemesis in the moment of evil triumph? And somewhere, perhaps, was there a woman to whom his death would be a gladness and a relief? The lady looked toward the wheeled-chair. "How was the injury caused?" she asked interestedly. "He was shot," said the elderly man. "Shot by a burglar. I remember reading of it in the newspapers at the time." Echo started. A little tremor ran over her. The scarf she held slipped from her hand. "It seems a pity sometimes," went on the voice, "that the law must graduate its penalties so nicely. Here is a man who, to all intents and purposes, was murdered. If he doesn't recover, his is a living death. Yet because he continues to breathe, the most that can be given to the scoundrel who shot him is a term of imprisonment. He ought to have been hanged!" The girl beside her pushed back her chair petulantly. "Oh, let's _do_ something!" she cried. "I want to get him out of my mind. I sat where I had to look at him in the train all day. It's too horrible! Fancy having to be like that, not being able to walk or talk or even to feed one's self! I want to go to the Casino and see something _funny_!" When the sound of their voices had died away in the corridor, Echo rose from her seat and walked along the terrace, quite to the end, where stood the wheeled-chair. On a bench near by an attendant was immersed in a newspaper. Then she turned and looked at the pallid, vacuous face above the steamer-rug. Yes--it was Cameron Craig. CHAPTER XXIX THE LONE BATTLE During those months Harry's visible life had been turning in an endless cycle of new-gained habit that ruled with vicious and numbing precision the huge conglomerate of which he was but a single atom--a bitter, dragging treadmill in which he was constrained to tramp steadily round and round with the hands of the clock, marking time, as it were, in a painful void that changed with mocking reverberations. The spectre that had smiled its cruel smile at him from the shadow in the little chamber back of the court-room had never left him. He had thrust it from him with all his strength, but it had come again and again to chuckle through the darkness.