ime, and in evident pain. With a restless movement he rolled his
head around, clearing his left ear from the pillow against which it had
been pressed. At once he heard and answered her, and at once she came to
me.

Pressing the pillow against his left ear, I asked him if he heard me, but
he gave no sign. Removing the pillow and, repeating the question he
answered promptly that he did.

"Do you know you are deaf in the right ear?" I asked.

"Yes," he answered in a low, strong voice, "and worse than that. My
whole right side is affected. It seems asleep. I cannot move arm or
leg."

"Feigning again?" I demanded angrily.

He shook his head, his stern mouth shaping the strangest, twisted smile.
It was indeed a twisted smile, for it was on the left side only, the
facial muscles of the right side moving not at all.

"That was the last play of the Wolf," he said. "I am paralysed. I shall
never walk again. Oh, only on the other side," he added, as though
divining the suspicious glance I flung at his left leg, the knee of which
had just then drawn up, and elevated the blankets.

"It's unfortunate," he continued. "I'd liked to have done for you first,
Hump. And I thought I had that much left in me."

"But why?" I asked; partly in horror, partly out of curiosity.

Again his stern mouth framed the twisted smile, as he said:

"Oh, just to be alive, to be living and doing, to be the biggest bit of
the ferment to the end, to eat you. But to die this way."

He shrugged his shoulders, or attempted to shrug them, rather, for the
left shoulder alone moved. Like the smile, the shrug was twisted.

"But how can you account for it?" I asked. "Where is the seat of your
trouble?"

"The brain," he said at once. "It was those cursed headaches brought it
on."

"Symptoms," I said.

He nodded his head. "There is no accounting for it. I was never sick in
my life. Something's gone wrong with my brain. A cancer, a tumour, or
something of that nature,--a thing that devours and destroys. It's
attacking my nerve-centres, eating them up, bit by bit, cell by
cell--from the pain."

"The motor-centres, too," I suggested.

"So it would seem; and the curse of it is that I must lie here,
conscious, mentally unimpaired, knowing that the lines are going down,
breaking bit by bit communication with the world. I cannot see, hearing
and feeling are leaving me, at this rate I shall soon cease to speak; yet
all the time I shall