nreal. And now it was gone--lost, as it seemed, beyond hope; and that
which was left to me was but the empty frame from which the picture had
vanished.

I have no idea how long I stood rooted to the spot where she had left
me, wrapped in a dull consciousness of pain, immersed in a half-numb
reverie. Recent events flitted, dream-like, through my mind; our happy
labours in the reading-room; our first visit to the Museum; and this
present day that had opened so brightly and with such joyous promise.
One by one these phantoms of a vanished happiness came and went.
Occasional visitors sauntered into the room--but the galleries were
mostly empty that day--gazed inquisitively at my motionless figure, and
went their way. And still the dull, intolerable ache in my breast went
on, the only vivid consciousness that was left to me.

Presently I raised my eyes and met those of the portrait. The sweet,
pensive face of the old Greek settler looked out at me wistfully as
though he would offer comfort; as though he would tell me that he, too,
had known sorrow when he lived his life in the sunny Fayyum. And a
subtle consolation, like the faint scent of old rose leaves, seemed to
exhale from that friendly face that had looked on the birth of my
happiness and had seen it wither and fade. I turned away, at last, with
a silent farewell; and when I looked back, he seemed to speed me on my
way with gentle valediction.

CHAPTER XVII

THE ACCUSING FINGER

Of my wanderings after I left the Museum on that black and dismal _dies
irae_, I have but a dim recollection. But I must have travelled a quite
considerable distance, since it wanted an hour or two to the time for
returning to the surgery, and I spent the interval walking swiftly
through streets and squares, unmindful of the happenings around, intent
only on my present misfortune, and driven by a natural impulse to seek
relief in bodily exertion. For mental distress sets up, as it were, a
sort of induced current of physical unrest; a beneficent arrangement, by
which a dangerous excess of emotional excitement may be transformed into
motor energy, and so safely got rid of. The motor apparatus acts as a
safety-valve to the psychical; and if the engine races for a while, with
the onset of bodily fatigue the emotional pressure-gauge returns to a
normal reading.

And so it was with me. At first I was conscious of nothing but a sense
of utter bereavement, of the shipwreck of all my hope