the fainting order, he only grew more and more ghastly in colour and
rigid in expression.

I felt very anxious about him, for the shock and the sudden anger
following on the trouble about Freda seemed to me enough to unhinge
even a less sensitive nature. 'At Strife' was the novel which had,
I firmly believe, kept him alive through that awful time at Ben
Rhydding, and I began to fear that the Major's fit of drunken malice
might prove the destruction of the author as well as of the book.
Everything had, as it were, come at once on poor Derrick; yet I
don't know that he fared worse than other people in this respect.

Life, unfortunately, is for most of us no well-arranged story with a
happy termination; it is a chequered affair of shade and sun, and
for one beam of light there come very often wide patches of shadow.
Men seem to have known this so far back as Shakespeare's time, and
to have observed that one woe trod on another's heels, to have
battled not with a single wave, but with a 'sea of troubles,' and to
have remarked that 'sorrows come not singly, but in battalions.'

However, owing I believe chiefly to his own self-command, and to his
untiring faculty for taking infinite pains over his work, Derrick
did not break down, but pleasantly cheated my expectations. I was
not called on to nurse him through a fever, and consumption did not
mark him for her own. In fact, in the matter of illness, he was
always a most prosaic, unromantic fellow, and never indulged in any
of the euphonious and interesting ailments. In all his life, I
believe, he never went in for anything but the mumps--of all
complaints the least interesting--and, may be, an occasional
headache.