to do
with one's force of character, he might have guessed that he did not
deserve the blame he meted out to himself. He might have remembered what
Shakespeare's Portia says to Brutus, that "humour hath his hour with
every man." But with a dull and unaccountable aching in his head and
back he compromised with himself. He would go to the castle and pass a
day or two. Then he would return and fight it out.

So he got on the packet Isaac Shelby, and was soon shaking with a chill
that showed how thoroughly malaria had pervaded his system. His very
bones seemed frozen. But if you ever shook with such a chill, or rather
if you were ever shaken by such a chill, taking hold of you like a
demoniacal possession; if you ever felt your brain congealing, your icy
bones breaking, your frosty heart becoming paralyzed, with a cold no
fire could reach, you know what it is; and if you have not felt it, no
words of mine can make you understand the sensations. After the chill
came the period when August felt himself between two parts of Milton's
hell, between a sea of ice and a sea of fire; sometimes the hot wave
scorched him, then it retired again before the icy one. At last it was
all hot, and the boiling blood scalded his palms and steamed to his
brain, bewildering his thoughts and almost blinding his eyes. He had
determined when he started to get off at a wood-yard three miles below
Andrew's castle, to avoid observation and the chance of arrest; and now
in his delirium the purpose as he had planned it remained fixed. He got
up at two o'clock, crazed with fever, dressed himself, and went out into
the rainy night. He went ashore in the mud and bushes, and, guided more
by instinct than by any conscious thought, he started up the wagon-track
along the river bank. His furious fever drove him on, talking to
himself, and splashing recklessly into the pools of rain-water standing
in the road. He never remembered his debarkation. He must have fallen
once or twice, for he was covered with mud when he rang the alarm at the
castle. In answer to Andrew's "Who's there?" he answered, "You'll have
to send a harder rain than that if you want to put this fire out!"

And so, what with the original disease, the mental discouragement, and
the exposure to the rain, the fever had well-nigh consumed the life, and
now that the waves of the hot sea after days of fire and nights of
delirium had gone back, there was hardly any life left in the body, and
the doc