"And those organs disturbed you at your work sometimes, perhaps," said Dora, seated in her accustomed place beside his pillow, ready to adjust his reading-lamp, to give him a new book, or to discuss any passage he showed her. He read immensely in those long hours of enforced captivity, but his reading had been chiefly on one particular line. He was reading the metaphysicians, from Plato and Aristotle to Schopenhauer and Hartmann; trying to find comfort for the anguish of his own individual position in the universal despondency of modern metaphysics. "A man chained to a sick-bed ought to be able to console himself with the notion that the great world around him is only an idea of his own brain; and yet even when convinced of the unreality of all things, there remains this one central point in the universe, the sense of personal pain. Such a belief might reconcile the sufferer to the idea of suicide, but hardly to the idea of existence. Ah, my Dora, if you are only a phantasm, you are the sweetest ghost that ever a man's brain invented to haunt and bless his life." "Don't you think you might read more interesting books while you are ill, Julian?" suggested his wife. "No, dear. These books are best, for they set me thinking upon abstract questions, and hinder me from brooding upon my own misery." What could Dora say to him by way of comfort, knowing too well that this misery of his was without hope on earth; knowing that this burden of pain which had fallen upon him must be carried to the very end; that day by day and hour by hour the gradual progress of decay must go on; no pause, no respite; decay so slow as to be almost imperceptible, save on looking back at what had been? "Thank God the brain is untouched," said Julian Wyllard, when his wife pitied him in his hours of suffering. "I should not have cared to sink into imbecility, to have only a dull vague sense of my own identity, like a vegetable in pain. I am thankful that Spencer assures me the brain is sound, and is likely to outlast this crippled frame." * * * * *