when he found his sensitive organ grateful even for grim favours,
he conferred them with a lighter hand. He wintered abroad, as the
phrase is; basked in the sun, stopped at home when the wind blew,
went to bed when it rained, and once or twice, when it had snowed
overnight, almost never got up again.

A secret hoard of indifference--like a thick cake a fond old
nurse might have slipped into his first school outfit--came to
his aid and helped to reconcile him to sacrifice; since at the
best he was too ill for aught but that arduous game. As he said
to himself, there was really nothing he had wanted very much to
do, so that he had at least not renounced the field of valour. At
present, however, the fragrance of forbidden fruit seemed
occasionally to float past him and remind him that the finest of
pleasures is the rush of action. Living as he now lived was like
reading a good book in a poor translation--a meagre entertainment
for a young man who felt that he might have been an excellent
linguist. He had good winters and poor winters, and while the
former lasted he was sometimes the sport of a vision of virtual
recovery. But this vision was dispelled some three years before
the occurrence of the incidents with which this history opens: he
had on that occasion remained later than usual in England and had
been overtaken by bad weather before reaching Algiers. He arrived
more dead than alive and lay there for several weeks between life
and death. His convalescence was a miracle, but the first use he
made of it was to assure himself that such miracles happen but
once. He said to himself that his hour was in sight and that it
behoved him to keep his eyes upon it, yet that it was also open
to him to spend the interval as agreeably as might be consistent
with such a preoccupation. With the prospect of losing them the