e, to kill the thoughts that
came and beat down the brutal rage. And as I stood there I heard Howard
cough in the next room--that slight effeminate cough he gave when
nervous or confused. I felt my blood leap at the sound, and it rushed
in a scalding stream over my face. I raised my head and began
mechanically to pace the room.

Even now it hardly seemed real, and my eyes kept returning and
returning to the console where the manuscript had always lain out of
work hours through the past year. "Devil! devil!" I muttered at
intervals; "what an unutterable devil." I don't know how long I walked
up and down, but suddenly a sense of physical fatigue, of collapse,
forced itself upon me. I threw myself in the corner of the couch and
took the dog's dead head upon my knee. Dead! It seemed strange--the
constant companion of ten years. I had had him from his first earliest
days.

Even before his eyes had opened I was struck by the intelligent way he
had lain at his mother's side, and surnamed him Nous on the spot, after
my favourite quality. I admit, like all good intelligences, because
they have always their own particular views on everything, he had given
a great deal of trouble. He had gnawed up my important business letters
when cutting his teeth; he had made beds on my new light spring suits;
he had sucked his favourite, most greasy mutton bone on the couch where
my best manuscript lay drying; and out of doors he strongly objected to
follow.

It is extremely annoying on a hot August afternoon, when you have just
time to catch the Richmond train, and a friend is with you, to have
your collie suddenly start off at a gallop in the opposite direction to
the station, and pay absolutely no attention to the most distracted
whistling and calling. Nothing for it but to start in pursuit, to run
yourself into a fever, and after lapse of time to return with the
fugitive to find your train missed and your friend as savage as a bear.

"If that dog were mine I'd thrash him within an inch of his life!" was
the usual remark when I got back.

"Then I am extremely glad he is not yours," I used to answer, fastening
on the dog's collar, and making him walk at the end of a foot of chain
as a punishment.

"You'll never teach him like that, Vic. If you gave him a good kick in
the eye now he'd remember it!"

"Thanks very much for your advice," I returned, "but I should never
forgive myself if I kicked any animal in the eye."

"You are a que