it sharp and quick,
as it happened. . . . As I've said, we stuck it out on that island
for two years, and a little over, hating one another as two lonely
men will come to hate, on island or lighthouse, even when they don't
start on a sworn enmity. Oh, you must have been through it to
understand! . . . We even quarrelled--and came almost to blows--over
the day of the month; though God knows what it helped either to be
right or wrong, and, as it happened, we were both wrong by a
fortnight or so."

"And then Farrell took ill.

"It was a kind of fever he caught while duck-snaring in the lagoon.
He'd start off there for a long day with his dog, the two practising
cleverness at the sport. I always felt somehow that, when his grief
came, it would come through the dog. . . . Well, he took a fever
which I couldn't well diagnose, to say whether it was rheumatic
or malarial. It ran to sweats and it ran to dry skin with
shivering-fits, the deuce of a temperature, and wild delirium.

"I nursed him, of course, and doctored him, keeping the fever at bay
as well as I could with decoctions of bark--quassia for the most
part--and fresh juice of limes. But it was the vigour of his frame
that pulled him through--as I believe all the skill in London could
not have availed to do in the days of his prosperity when he was fat
and fleshy. Hard life on the island had thinned him down and
tautened and toughened him so that I wondered sometimes, washing his
body, if this was indeed the man with whom I had vowed my quarrel.

"His ravings in delirium, however, left no doubt on that score!
I tell you I had to listen to some fairly obscene descriptions of
myself and his feelings for me--all in the best Houndsditch. . . .
Yet here again was a queer thing--again and again this gutter-flow
would check itself, drop its Cockney as if down a sink, and, bubbling
up again, start flowing to the language of an educated man. . . . The
first time this happened it gave me a shock, less the abruptness of
the break than by its sudden assault upon my memory. All insensibly,
and unmarked by me, Farrell's accent and way of speech had been
nearing those of decent folk. They were by no means perfect, but
they had amazingly improved. . . . Now, when his delirium plunged him
back to Houndsditch, though it gave me a jerk, I could account for it
as reversion to an old habit that had been put off before ever we
met. What beat me was, that his second style, acc