a huge bowl of milk, and set it before him without a word. A flush
passed swiftly across his face and faded away, as, with quick
sensitiveness, he glanced at Nicolas and another passenger, a fat priest.
They took no notice, and, reassured, he said, with a laugh, that the
landlady knew exactly what he wanted. Lifting the dish, he drained it at
a gasp, though the milk almost choked him, and, to the apprehension of
his hostess, set the bowl spinning on the table like a top. Another
illusion of the disease was his: that he succeeded perfectly in deceiving
everybody round him with his pathetic make-believe; and, unlike most
deceivers, he deceived himself as well. The two actions, inconsistent
as they were, were reconciled in him, as in all the race of consumptives,
by some strange chemistry of the mind and spirit. He was on the broad,
undiverging highway to death; yet, with every final token about him that
he was in the enemy's country, surrounded, trapped, soon to be passed
unceremoniously inside the citadel at the end of the avenue, he kept
signalling back to old friends that all was well, and he told himself
that to-morrow the king should have his own again--"To-morrow, and to-
morrow, and to-morrow!"

He was not very thin in body; his face was full, and at times his eyes
were singularly and fascinatingly bright. He had colour--that hectic
flush which, on his cheek, was almost beautiful. One would have turned
twice to see. The quantities of spirits that he drank (he ate little)
would have killed a half-dozen healthy men. To him it was food, taken
up, absorbed by the fever of his disease, giving him a real, not a
fictitious strength; and so it would continue to do till some artery
burst and choked him, or else, by some miracle of air and climate, the
hole in his lung healed up again; which he, in his elation, believed
would be "to-morrow." Perhaps the air, the food, and life of Bonaventure
were the one medicine he needed!