emporarily risk the
editor of the "Herald" to such capable hands, and they returned quietly
to their homes; only a few were delayed in reaching Carlow by travelling
to the first station in the opposite direction before they succeeded in
planting themselves on the proper train.

Meanwhile, the object of their solicitude tossed and burned on his bed
of pain. He was delirious most of the time, and, in the intervals of
half-consciousness, found that his desire to live, very strong at first,
had disappeared; he did not care much about anything except rest--he
wanted peace. In his wanderings he was almost always back in his college
days, beholding them in an unhappy, distorted fashion. He would lie
asprawl on the sward with the others, listening to the Seniors singing
on the steps, and, all at once, the old, kindly faces would expand
enormously and press over him with hideous mouthings, and an ugly Senior
in cap and gown would stamp him and grind a spiked heel into his hand;
then they would toss him high into air that was all flames, and he would
fall and fall through the raging heat, seeing the cool earth far beneath
him, but never able to get down to it again. And then he was driven
miles and miles by dusky figures, through a rain of boiling water; and
at other times the whole universe was a vast, hot brass bell, and it
gave off a huge, continuous roar and hum, while he was a mere point of
consciousness floating in the exact centre of the heat and sound waves,
and he listened, listened for years, to the awful, brazen hum from which
there could be no escape; at the same time it seemed to him that he was
only a Freshman on the slippery roof of the tower, trying to steal the
clapper of the chapel bell.

Finally he came to what he would have considered a lucid interval, had
it not appeared that Helen Sherwood was whispering to Tom Meredith at
the foot of his bed. This he knew to be a fictitious presentation of
his fever, for was she not by this time away and away for foreign lands?
And, also, Tom Meredith was a slim young thing, and not the middle-aged
youth with an undeniable stomach and a baldish head, who, by the
grotesque necromancy of his hallucinations, assumed a preposterous
likeness to his old friend. He waved his hand to the figures and they
vanished like figments of a dream; but all the same the vision had been
realistic enough for the lady to look exquisitely pretty. No one could
help wishing to stay in a world whic