CHAPTER VI.

INDIVIDUAL CONCESSIONS ARE LIKE POLITICAL; WHEN YOU ONCE BEGIN,
THERE IS NO SAYING WHERE YOU WILL STOP.

Waife's first words on recovering consciousness were given to thoughts of
Sophy. He had promised her to return, at farthest, the next day; she
would be so uneasy he must get up--he must go at once. When he found his
strength would not suffer him to rise, he shed tears. It was only very
gradually and at intervals that he became acquainted with the length and
severity of his attack, or fully sensible that he was in Darrell's house;
that that form, of which he had retained vague dreamy reminiscences,
hanging over his pillow, wiping his brow, and soothing him with the
sweetest tones of the sweet human voice--that that form, so genial, so
brotherlike, was the man who had once commanded him not to sully with his
presence a stainless home.

All that had passed within the last few days was finally made clear to
him in a short, unwitnessed, touching conversation with his host; after
which, however, he became gradually worse; his mind remaining clear, but
extremely dejected; his bodily strength evidently sinking. Dr. F------
was again summoned in haste. That great physician was, as every great
physician should be, a profound philosopher, though with a familiar ease
of manner, and a light off-hand vein of talk, which made the philosophy
less sensible to the taste than any other ingredient in his
pharmacopoeia. Turning everybody else out of the room, he examined his
patient alone--sounded the old man's vital organs, with ear and with