When Zarden regained his senses he was in hospital, weak and spent by fever; his brain had hardly as yet recovered from the shock. "Have I been ill?" he inquired, but the nurse told him to lie still and ask no questions. As yet he could remember nothing. The sun glinted in through the windows and flecked the white-washed walls here and there with gleams of golden light. There were rows and rows of beds in the long ward, placed side by side, and Red Cross nurses were flitting about among them. It was all very strange to him. After a while his eyes rested upon the _ikon_ hanging on the wall. This was the first time he had noticed it, and his memory brought him fitful shadows of the last occasion on which he had seen one. An aged woman, of whom he had but a hazy remembrance, was kneeling before it. While he was trying to straighten out the tangle of mixed-up ideas in his mind, a cry from one of the beds in the ward held his attention. "Save me; I am sinking!" cried an agonized voice. Then, in a flash, he remembered those pitiful shrieks of despair, and he covered his face with his hands. Memory, that fickle jade, had come back at the point where she had deserted him, and he lay back with closed eyes while pictures floated through his brain of what he had passed through that dreadful day, followed by the starlit night when he could hear the troop-horse cropping the herbage at his side and the strike of the animal's iron-shod hoofs as he slipped over stones, weighted with his burden. Soon it all came back to him. "Bring me a mirror, nurse," he said. It was the first thing he had asked for. He looked at it; then, with a wild shriek, he flung it away. "It is another--not me! Who am I?" he cried. "My hair and beard are as white as snow! It is not me, Mooska Zarden, any more." The nurse picked up the fragments of the broken glass hastily, and he lay back raving as he had done in his fever. "You must dye his hair and beard at once," the doctor ordered, "otherwise he will lose his reason. With care, however, he will recover; it is a nervous breakdown." IV--AT THE DOOR OF HIS MOTHER'S HOME