wisdom still. There was a reason for everything; there were reasons
for all this. I alone had been saved out of all those souls who
sailed from Melbourne in the Lady Jermyn. Why should I have been
the favored one; I with my broken heart and now lonely life? Some
great inscrutable reason there must be; at my worst I did not deny
that. But neither did I puzzle my sick brain with the reason. I
just waited for it to be revealed to me, if it were God's will
ever to reveal it. And that I conceive to be the one spirit in
which a man may contemplate, with equal sanity and reverence, the
mysteries and the miseries of his life.




CHAPTER VII

I FIND A FRIEND



The night after I consulted the specialist I was quite determined
to sleep. I had laid in a bundle of the daily papers. No country
cottage was advertised to let but I knew of it by evening, and about
all the likely ones I had already written. The scheme occupied my
thoughts. Trout-fishing was a desideratum. I would take my
rod and plenty of books, would live simply and frugally, and it
should make a new man of me by Christmas. It was now October. I
went to sleep thinking of autumn tints against an autumn sunset.
It must have been very early, certainly not later than ten o'clock;
the previous night I had not slept at all.