vented fever of body or mind, and it kept him sane while he groped slowly toward the light.
"The fact that you have so little blood left in you is your great salvation," said Baskerville one day, and Dick assented with an amused gravity.
His spirit had still enough blood in it to make thinking a very vital thing through those long and lonely days. His thoughts were often necessarily painful and sordid and miserable. He had lived too long in such an atmosphere to struggle out of it easily. But there was an unexpected luminosity about some things now. Since he had seen that light in Andree's dying eyes he knew with that belief which is beyond reason that her fiery, untamed soul was not a thing which death had blown out. Since he had walked so close to the borderland of death himself he began to look on it as a probable development, not an extinction. And if it were possible to believe this thing which he could not prove, then many unprovable things were possible. Day by day as he lay there he thought these puzzles out, mocking at himself often, sinking down into the old sloughs often, and yet finding a strange persevering interest and amusement in recognising some rationality in those things which did not answer to the touch-stone of logic, and which he would once have swept away for that reason.
He did not dare let himself think too much of his probable maiming; he was too weak to talk for long at a time, and so he thought, not realising that this was the natural flower from that new growth of charity towards his neighbour which had led him to help Tempest in the first place; to rouse Slicker from his inertia; to attempt rescue of the white baby from Alphonse Michu. To the end of his life he would almost certainly mock more than he would sympathise; but now that the blackest of his trouble was upon him he was losing much of the bitterness which had characterised his whole life. It seemed as if through recognising his weakness he was at last gaining inner strength. Even Hensham's noisy rejoicing over the fact that Dick would not have to lose his foot did not rouse that caustic tongue. But Dick's heart knew that to drag a useless member through life would be little better than
