a strange laugh and rammed a broken old straw hat on his head. And
Dr. Monygham, after having tottered, continued on his way. He advanced
one stick, then one maimed foot, then the other stick; the other foot
followed only a very short distance along the ground, toilfully, as
though it were almost too heavy to be moved at all; and yet his legs
under the hanging angles of the poncho appeared no thicker than the two
sticks in his hands. A ceaseless trembling agitated his bent body,
all his wasted limbs, his bony head, the conical, ragged crown of the
sombrero, whose ample flat rim rested on his shoulders.

In such conditions of manner and attire did Dr. Monygham go forth to
take possession of his liberty. And these conditions seemed to bind
him indissolubly to the land of Costaguana like an awful procedure of
naturalization, involving him deep in the national life, far deeper than
any amount of success and honour could have done. They did away with his
Europeanism; for Dr. Monygham had made himself an ideal conception
of his disgrace. It was a conception eminently fit and proper for an
officer and a gentleman. Dr. Monygham, before he went out to Costaguana,
had been surgeon in one of Her Majesty's regiments of foot. It was a
conception which took no account of physiological facts or reasonable
arguments; but it was not stupid for all that. It was simple. A rule of
conduct resting mainly on severe rejections is necessarily simple. Dr.
Monygham's view of what it behoved him to do was severe; it was an ideal
view, in so much that it was the imaginative exaggeration of a correct
feeling. It was also, in its force, influence, and persistency, the view
of an eminently loyal nature.

There was a great fund of loyalty in Dr. Monygham's nature. He had
settled it all on Mrs. Gould's head. He believed her worthy of every
devotion. At the bottom of his heart he felt an angry uneasiness before
the prosperity of the San Tome mine, because its growth was robbing her
of all peace of mind. Costaguana was no place for a woman of that kind.
What could Charles Gould have been thinking of when he brought her
out there! It was outrageous! And the doctor had watched the course
of events with a grim and distant reserve which, he imagined, his
lamentable history imposed upon him.

Loyalty to Mrs. Gould could not, however, leave out of account the
safety of her husband. The doctor had contrived to be in town at the
critical time because he mistru