s and corrections upon the proofs of the Minority
Report. He found it increasingly difficult to make decisions; he would
correct and alter back and then repeat the correction, perhaps half a
dozen times. On the evening of the second day his lungs became painful
and his breathing difficult. His head ached and a sense of some great
impending evil came upon him. His skin was suddenly a detestable garment
to wear. He took his temperature with a little clinical thermometer he
kept by him and found it was a hundred and one. He telephoned hastily
for Dr. Martineau and without waiting for his arrival took a hot bath
and got into bed. He was already thoroughly ill when the doctor arrived.

"Forgive my sending for you," he said. "Not your line. I know.... My
wife's G.P.--an exasperating sort of ass. Can't stand him. No one else."

He was lying on a narrow little bed with a hard pillow that the doctor
replaced by one from Lady Hardy's room. He had twisted the bed-clothes
into a hopeless muddle, the sheet was on the floor.

Sir Richmond's bedroom was a large apartment in which sleep seemed to
have been an admitted necessity rather than a principal purpose. On one
hand it opened into a business-like dressing and bath room, on the other
into the day study. It bore witness to the nocturnal habits of a man who
had long lived a life of irregular impulses to activity and dislocated
hours and habits. There was a desk and reading lamp for night work near
the fireplace, an electric kettle for making tea at night, a silver
biscuit tin; all the apparatus for the lonely intent industry of the
small hours. There was a bookcase of bluebooks, books of reference and
suchlike material, and some files. Over the mantelpiece was an enlarged
photograph of Lady Hardy and a plain office calendar. The desk was
littered with the galley proofs of the Minority Report upon which Sir
Richmond had been working up to the moment of his hasty retreat to bed.
And lying among the proofs, as though it had been taken out and looked
at quite recently was the photograph of a girl. For a moment Dr.
Martineau's mind hung in doubt and then he knew it for the young
American of Stonehenge. How that affair had ended he did not know. And
now it was not his business to know.

These various observations printed themselves on Dr. Martineau's mind
after his first cursory examination of his patient and while he cast
about for anything that would give this large industrious apartm