me to
spoil my stomach. I should not have remembered them, much less let them
haunt me this way, like a cursed file of ghosts. I'll try gentian
to-morrow.'

Everything and everyone was poking at the one point of his secret
fears. Dr. Walsingham preached a sermon upon the text, 'remember the
days of darkness for they are many.' It went over the tremendous themes
of death and judgment in the rector's own queer, solemn, measured way,
and all the day after rang in Sturk's ear as the drums and fifes in the
muffled peal of the Dead March used to do long ago, before his ear grew
familiar with its thrilling roll. Sermons usually affected Sturk no more
than they did other military gentlemen. But he was in a morbid state;
and in this one or two terms or phrases, nothing in themselves, happened
to touch upon a sensitive and secret centre of pain in the doctor's
soul.

For instance, when he called death 'the great bankruptcy which would
make the worldly man, in a moment, the only person in his house not
worth a shilling,' the preacher glanced unconsciously at a secret fear
in the caverns of Sturk's mind, that echoed back the sonorous tones and
grisly theme of the rector with a hollow thunder.

There was a time when Sturk, like other shrewd, bustling fellows, had no
objection to hear who had an execution in his house, who was bankrupt,
and who laid by the heels; but now he shrunk from such phrases. He hated
to think that a clever fellow was ever absolutely beggared in the
world's great game. He turned his eye quickly from the _Gazette_, as it
lay with other papers on the club table; for its grim pages seemed to
look in his face with a sort of significance, as if they might some day
or other have a small official duty to perform by him; and when an
unexpected bankruptcy was announced by Cluffe or Toole in the club-room,
it made his ear ring like a slap, and he felt sickish for half an hour
after.

One of that ugly brood of dreams which haunted his nights, borrowed,
perhaps, a hint from Dr. Walsingham's sermon. Sturk thought he heard
Toole's well-known, brisk voice, under his windows, exclaim, 'What is
the dirty beggar doing there? faugh!--he smells all over like
carrion--ha, ha ha!' and looking out, in his dream, from his
drawing-room window, he saw a squalid mendicant begging alms at his
hall-door. 'Hollo, you, Sir; what do want there?' cried the surgeon,
with a sort of unaccountable antipathy and fear. 'He lost his last
shill