wanee. At the corner of the two streets on
which it fronted he had added a square tower or "observatory." But
neither guests nor "resi_dent_ers" had made use of it as he had
designed. Its low top was too high to be reached with that Southern ease
which Northern sojourners like, and besides, you couldn't see more than
half the earth anyhow when you got up there.

Early, therefore, it had been turned into an airy bed-chamber for
Bulger. He, however was gone. He had left Suez for good and all on the
same day on which John March arrived from abroad, being so advised to do
by Captains Champion and Shotwell, who loved a good joke with a good fat
coward to saddle it on, and who had got enough of Bulger on the day of
the skirmish mentioned a page or two back. The tower room he left came
to be looked upon as specially adapted for the sick, and here, some
eleven or twelve months after the wreck of the Three Counties Land and
Improvement Company, Limited, John March lay on his bed by night and sat
on it by day, wasted, bright-eyed, and pale, with a corded frown forever
between his brows save in the best moments of his unquiet sleep.

On the hither side of one of the two streets close under him, his
office--the old, first one, reopened on his return--stood closed, the
sign renovated and tacked up once more, and the early addendum,
_Gentleman_, still asserting itself, firmly though modestly, beneath the
new surface of repair. In and from that office he had, for these many
months, waged a bloodless but aggressive and indomitable war on the men
who, he felt, had robbed, not merely him, but his mother, and the grave
of his father, under the forms and cover of commerce and law; yet from
whom he had not been able to take their outermost intrenchment--the
slothful connivance of a community which had let itself be made a
passive sharer of their spoils. Now, in that office his desk was covered
with ten days' dust. "If you don't shut this thing up straight off and
go, say, to Chalybeate Springs," the doctor had one day exclaimed,
"you'll not last half through the summer." March had answered with
jesting obduracy, and two nights later had fainted on the stairs of Tom
Hersey's hotel. For twenty-four hours afterward he had been "not
expected to live." During which time Suez had entirely reconsidered
him--conduct, character, capacity--and had given him, at the expense of
his adversaries, a higher value and regard than ever, and a wholly new
aff