to southward, still
carried remembrance of sunrise in a broad band of faint yellowish pink,
fading upward into misty azure and barred with horizontal pencillings of
tarnished silver cloud.

Thus far Charles Verity had watched the progress of the bowed,
slow-moving figure musingly. But now, as the iron of the hoe clinked
against the gravel flints, he came back, so to say, to himself and back
to the supreme question at issue. He looked up, his eyes and the
soundless ironic laughter resident in them, meeting McCabe's twinkling,
cunning yet faithful and merry little eyes, with a flash.

"The work of the world is not arrested," he said. "See, that
octogenarian, old West. He wheeled ill-oiled, squeaking barrows and
hacked at the garden paths when I was a Harchester boy. He wheels the one
and hacks at the other even yet--a fact nicely lowering to one's private
egotism, when you come to consider it. Why, then, my good friend,
perjure yourself or strive to mince matters? The work of the world will
be done whether I'm here to direct the doing of it or not.--Granted I am
tough and in personal knowledge of ill-health a neophyte. My luck
throughout has been almost uncanny. Neither in soldiering nor in sport,
from man or from beast, have I ever suffered so much as a scratch. I have
borne a charmed life--established a record for invulnerability, which
served me well in the East where the gods still walk in the semblance of
man and miracle is still persistently prevalent. Accident has passed me
by--save for being laid up once, nearly thirty years ago, with a broken
ankle in the house of some friends at Poonah."

He ceased speaking, checking, as it seemed, disposition to further
disclosure; while the soundless laughter in his eyes found answering
expression upon his lips, curving them, to a somewhat bitter smile
beneath the flowing moustache.

"In to-day's enforced idleness how persistently cancelled episodes and
emotions rap, ghostly, on the door demanding and gaining entrance!" he
presently said. "Must we take it, Doctor, that oblivion is a fiction,
merciful forgetfulness an illusion; and that every action, every
desire--whether fulfilled or not--is printed indelibly upon one's memory,
merely waiting the hour of weakness and physical defeat to show up?"

"The Lord only knows!" McCabe threw off, a little hopelessly. This was
the first utterance approaching complaint; and he deplored it for his
patient's sake. He didn't like that w