ace revealed was
the face of a shriveled old negress, sitting opposite the lady on the
back seat. The third was the face of a little sleeping child in the
negress's lap. With a quick gesture of impatience, the lady signed to
the nurse to leave the carriage first with the child. "Pray take them
out of the way," she said to the landlady; "pray take them to their
room." She got out herself when her request had been complied with.
Then the light fell clear for the first time on the further side of the
carriage, and the fourth traveler was disclosed to view.

He lay helpless on a mattress, supported by a stretcher; his hair, long
and disordered, under a black skull-cap; his eyes wide open, rolling
to and fro ceaselessly anxious; the rest of his face as void of all
expression of the character within him, and the thought within him, as
if he had been dead. There was no looking at him now, and guessing what
he might once have been. The leaden blank of his face met every question
as to his age, his rank, his temper, and his looks which that face might
once have answered, in impenetrable silence. Nothing spoke for him now
but the shock that had struck him with the death-in-life of paralysis.
The doctor's eye questioned his lower limbs, and Death-in-Life answered,
_I am here_. The doctor's eye, rising attentively by way of his hands
and arms, questioned upward and upward to the muscles round his mouth,
and Death-in-Life answered, _I am coming_.

In the face of a calamity so unsparing and so dreadful, there was
nothing to be said. The silent sympathy of help was all that could be
offered to the woman who stood weeping at the carriage door.

As they bore him on his bed across the hall of the hotel, his wandering
eyes encountered the face of his wife. They rested on her for a moment,
and in that moment he spoke.

"The child?" he said in English, with a slow, thick, laboring
articulation.

"The child is safe upstairs," she answered, faintly.

"My desk?"

"It is in my hands. Look! I won't trust it to anybody; I am taking care
of it for you myself."

He closed his eyes for the first time after that answer, and said no
more. Tenderly and skillfully he was carried up the stairs, with his
wife on one side of him, and the doctor (ominously silent) on the other.
The landlord and the servants following saw the door of his room open
and close on him; heard the lady burst out crying hysterically as soon
as she was alone with the docto