r." They even tried to shave the hair from the
affected spot. He bore it as long as he could. But it was too much. His
left side shook and trembled. It was too terrible to begin to describe.

"It's no good," he said, "it's more than you can expect any one to put
up with. You'll have to stop it."

So they tied his head up once more, and he was carried upstairs into a
bedroom. They lifted him on to the bed, managed at length to divest him
of his jacket, turned some clothes over him, and left him.

* * * * *

In an hour a raging fever had taken hold of him.

Only intermittently, during the next three or four days, did he so much
as touch the world of realities. The only improvement was his face,
which had to a great extent relaxed. Otherwise the pain and the
paralysis were the same, and all the time the fever raged within him.

Somehow, when he awoke from his horrible dreams it was always dark. And
the remarkable thing was that the same nightmares seemed to haunt him
with persistent regularity. Always he lay down upon a hillside--nebulous
black, and furry. Always too, he had been "left," and the enemy was
swooping quickly down upon him. He would wake up to find himself once
more inert upon the bed, would curse himself for a fool, and vow that
never again would he allow his mind to drift towards that terrible
thought again.

J.O. double F.R.E? What was it? A Name? Whose? When and Why? He would
catch himself worrying about this many times. He would awake with a
start, and realise that the solution was a perfectly easy matter. Then
he would straightway fall asleep, to worry once again.

There was a big vase on a table near the bedside. He took an implacable
dislike to it, and longed to shatter it into atoms. "Horrible
pretentious affair," he would mutter.

When he awoke from his fever, he would always make frantic efforts to
hang on to consciousness. To this end he would always call the Orderly,
ask the time, demand water or Bovril--anything to keep him a little
longer in touch with the world.

Sometimes he would see bleared faces looking down upon him out of the
dizzy greyness. He remembers being told that "the Colonel" was coming to
see him. He never knew whether it was his own Colonel or some A.D.M.S.

The thought did indeed come to him that he was going mad. But he had not
the power to worry about the discovery, and insensibility would claim
him once more before he could realise