the first place, it was a mean dodge to escape the absolute pulverisation
Hapley had in hand for him, and in the second, it left Hapley's mind with
a queer gap in it. For twenty years he had worked hard, sometimes far
into the night, and seven days a week, with microscope, scalpel,
collecting-net, and pen, and almost entirely with reference to Pawkins.
The European reputation he had won had come as an incident in that great
antipathy. He had gradually worked up to a climax in this last
controversy. It had killed Pawkins, but it had also thrown Hapley out of
gear, so to speak, and his doctor advised him to give up work for a time,
and rest. So Hapley went down into a quiet village in Kent, and thought
day and night of Pawkins, and good things it was now impossible to say
about him.

At last Hapley began to realise in what direction the pre-occupation
tended. He determined to make a fight for it, and started by trying to
read novels. But he could not get his mind off Pawkins, white in the face
and making his last speech--every sentence a beautiful opening for Hapley.
He turned to fiction--and found it had no grip on him. He read the "Island
Nights' Entertainments" until his "sense of causation" was shocked beyond
endurance by the Bottle Imp. Then he went to Kipling, and found he "proved
nothing," besides being irreverent and vulgar. These scientific people
have their limitations. Then unhappily, he tried Besant's "Inner House,"
and the opening chapter set his mind upon learned societies and Pawkins at
once.

So Hapley turned to chess, and found it a little more soothing. He soon
mastered the moves and the chief gambits and commoner closing positions,
and began to beat the Vicar. But then the cylindrical contours of the
opposite king began to resemble Pawkins standing up and gasping
ineffectually against check-mate, and Hapley decided to give up chess.

Perhaps the study of some new branch of science would after all be better
diversion. The best rest is change of occupation. Hapley determined to
plunge at diatoms, and had one of his smaller microscopes and Halibut's
monograph sent down from London. He thought that perhaps if he could get
up a vigorous quarrel with Halibut, he might be able to begin life afresh
and forget Pawkins. And very soon he was hard at work in his habitual
strenuous fashion, at these microscopic denizens of the way-side pool.

It was on the third day of the diatoms that Hapley became aware of a no