"Sorry, old fellow," he said contritely. "I'm very sorry. I oughtn't to have spoken like that. But I'm not what they call 'disintegrating'; I'm the last man to do that. When I say 'I' I mean the 'I' I've always been. That's just the devil of it." "Suppose you begin at the beginning," I suggested. "There you are!" was his swift reply. He was sitting up on the sofa now, and was facing it, whatever "it" was, with a calmer courage. "I _can't_ begin at the beginning. All I really _know_ yet's the end, and of course that hasn't come.... It's a damn-all of a problem. Get yourself a drink if you want one. No, I won't have one; I--I daren't. And you might draw the curtains. When I hear the buses and taxis it makes me want to go out." I drew his curtains for him, but did not take the drink. He sat on the sofa leaning a little forward, his great hands clasped between his knees and working slightly and powerfully, as if he cracked walnuts in the palms of them. The grey-blue eyes avoided mine. I have seen that same avoiding glance in the eyes of a man who had something perfectly true to tell, but so utterly improbable that he was self-convicted of lying even in speaking of it. "About what you were saying this afternoon in that Club place--my age," he began in a constrained voice. "You--you meant it, I suppose?" "That you'd live to be a hundred and be world-famous? Yes, I meant it in a way. I didn't mean you to take me too literally, of course." "And you thought"--he hesitated for a moment and shivered slightly--"it was something to be congratulated about?" "Well--isn't it? Professionally you've staked out a magnificent course for yourself in which time means practically everything, and so, if you live long enough, as you look like doing----" Yet I cannot tell you what premonition of calamity seemed already to flow like an induced current from him to me. Ordinarily I am not specially sensitised to receive impressions of this kind. I am just a man who had had the luck to think as most other people think and to be able to express their thoughts for them. The greater therefore must have been that current's projecting force. Certainly the greater was my shock when it did come. "I shan't live to be a hundred," he said in a low voice. I cannot remember what I said, or whether I said anything at all. All that I do remember is his own next words, the swift and agonising collapse of the whole man as he said them, and the feeling of my own nape and spine. "No, not a hundred. You're counting the wrong way. You got my age quite right this afternoon. I'm thirty-five. And I shall live till I'm sixteen." III