basket, meaning to ask afterwards if the doctor minded his
reading that book. But the question never was asked; the book was still
in the basket when the doctor had finished drying his face; and the boy
was staring and swaying as though he had seen the dead.

"Why, what's the matter with my young fellow?" inquired Baumgartner,
solicitously.

"Nothing! I'll be all right soon," muttered Pocket, wiping his forehead
and then his hand.

"You look faint. Here's my sponge. No, lie flat down there first!"

But Pocket was not going to lie down on that bed.

"I do feel seedy," he said, in a stronger voice with a new note in it,
"but I'm not going to faint. I'm quite well able to go upstairs. I'd
rather lie down on my own bed, if you don't mind."

His own bed! The irony struck him even as he said the words. He was none
the less glad to sit down on it; and so sitting he made his first close
examination of two or three tiny squares of paper which he had picked out
of the basket in the doctor's room instead of Boismont's book on
hallucinations. There had been no hallucination about those scraps of
paper; they were fragments of the boy's own letter to his sister, which
Dr. Baumgartner had never posted at all.

A LIKELY STORY

At that moment help was as far away as it had been near the day before,
when Eugene Thrush was closeted in the doctor's dining-room; for not only
had Mr. Upton decamped for Leicestershire, without a word of warning to
anybody, on the Saturday afternoon, but Thrush himself had followed by the
only Sunday train.

A bell was ringing for evening service when he landed in a market town
which reversed the natural order by dozing all summer and waking up for
the hunting season. And now the famous grass country was lying in its
beauty-sleep, under a gay counterpane of buttercups and daisies, and leafy
coverts, with but one blot in the sky-line, in the shape of a permanent
plume of sluggish smoke. But the works lay hidden, and the hall came
first; and Thrush, having ascertained that this was it, abandoned the
decrepit vessel he had boarded at the station, and entered the grounds on
foot.

A tall girl, pacing the walks with a terribly anxious face, was
encountered and accosted before he reached the house.

"I believe Mr. Upton lives here. Can you tell me if he's at home? I want
to see him about something."

Lettice flushed and shrank.

"I know who you are! Have you found my brother?"