affectionately.

"Well! That's enough. We will have no more of it."

And indeed there was no more question of my mysterious vocation between
us. There was to be no more question of it at all, nowhere or with any
one. We began the descent of the Furca Pass conversing merrily. Eleven
years later, month for month, I stood on Tower Hill on the steps of the
St. Katherine's Dockhouse, a master in the British Merchant Service. But
the man who put his hand on my shoulder at the top of the Furca Pass was
no longer living.

That very year of our travels he took his degree of the Philosophical
Faculty--and only then his true vocation declared itself. Obedient to
the call he entered at once upon the four-year course of the Medical
Schools. A day came when, on the deck of a ship moored in Calcutta, I
opened a letter telling me of the end of an enviable existence. He had
made for himself a practice in some obscure little town of Austrian
Galicia. And the letter went on to tell me how all the bereaved poor of
the district, Christians and Jews alike, had mobbed the good doctor's
coffin with sobs and lamentations at the very gate of the cemetery.

How short his years and how clear his vision! What greater reward in
ambition, honour and conscience could he have hoped to win for himself
when, on the top of the Furca Pass, he bade me look well to the end of
my opening life.



Chapter III.