fingers.

She was gone--and life seemed over for him.

Here, perhaps an hour later, Tompson found him still unconscious, and in
terrified haste sent off for a doctor, and telegraphed to Sir Charles
Verdayne:

"Come at once, TOMPSON."

But ere his father could arrive on Sunday, Paul was lying 'twixt life and
death, madly raving with brain fever.

And thus ended the three weeks of his episode.




CHAPTER XXI


Have any of you who read crept back to life from nearly beyond the grave?
Crept back to find it shorn of all that made it fair? After hours of
delirium to awaken in great weakness to a sense of hideous anguish and
loss--to the prospect of days of aching void and hopeless longing, to the
hourly, momentary sting of remembrance of things vaster than death, more
dear than life itself? If you have come through this valley of the shadow,
then you can know what the first days of returning consciousness meant to
Paul.