ld seek and perhaps succeed in
revealing itself to me.

A postscript concluded the letter, to which at the time I attached no
importance. He had made a purchase of the hut in which he had died.
After his removal it was to remain empty.

I folded the letter and placed it among other papers, and passing into
the hut took a farewell glance at the massive, rugged face. The mask
might have served a sculptor for the embodiment of strength. He gave
one the feeling that having conquered death he was sleeping.

I did what he had requested of me. Indeed, I could not help it. I
thought of him constantly. That may have been the explanation of it.

I was bicycling through Norfolk, and one afternoon, to escape a coming
thunderstorm, I knocked at the door of a lonely cottage on the
outskirts of a common. The woman, a kindly bustling person, asked me
in; and hoping I would excuse her, as she was busy ironing, returned to
her work in another room. I thought myself alone, and was standing at
the window watching the pouring rain. After a while, without knowing
why, I turned. And then I saw a child seated on a high chair behind a
table in a dark corner of the room. A book of pictures was open before
it, but it was looking at me. I could hear the sound of the woman at
her ironing in the other room. Outside there was the steady thrashing
of the rain. The child was looking at me with large, round eyes filled
with a terrible pathos. I noticed that the little body was misshapen.
It never moved; it made no sound; but I had the feeling that out of
those strangely wistful eyes something was trying to speak to me.
Something was forming itself before me--not visible to my sight; but it
was there, in the room. It was the man I had last looked upon as,
dying, he sat beside me in the hut below the Jungfrau. But something
had happened to him. Moved by instinct I went over to him and lifted
him out of his chair, and with a sob the little wizened arms closed
round my neck and he clung to me crying--a pitiful, low, wailing cry.

Hearing his cry, the woman came back. A comely, healthy-looking woman.
She took him from my arms and comforted him.

"He gets a bit sorry for himself at times," she explained. "At least,
so I fancy. You see, he can't run about like other children, or do
anything without getting pains."

"Was it an accident?" I asked.

"No," she answered, "and his father as fine a man as you would find in
a day's march. J