physical exertions in pure air and with rational hours. He complained
of feeling liable to faintness after standing about in hot rooms. It
did not cause him, however, any serious alarm, till one evening he
fainted after a dinner-party at which I was present, and we had some
difficulty in bringing him round.

After this, for several days he spoke of an invincible languor which
held him throughout the day, which he could not get rid of; and he
was altogether so unlike his usual self, and so prostrate, that at
last, with the greatest difficulty, I prevailed on him to see a
doctor—a thing he particularly disliked.

He made an appointment with a celebrated physician in Wimpole Street.
As he was far from well on the morning he was to go there, I insisted
on accompanying him.

He was in very cheerful spirits, and was eagerly discussing a book
which had just been published; he could not make up his mind whether
it had been written by a man or a woman. He said that there was
always one character in a book, not always the hero or heroine,
through whose eyes the writer seemed to look, whose mental analysis
seemed to have the ring not of description, but confession, and this
would be found to be, he maintained, of the sex of the writer. In
the particular case under discussion, where the hero was a man, he
professed to discover the "spy," as he called this character, in a
woman.

In the middle of the discussion we drew up at Dr. Hall's door, and
were immediately shown into one of those rooms with a professional
and suspicious calm about it. "'Five minutes before the drop falls,'