They had thought I should die, too, all the people who had rushed into the room and found us that night.  Myself unconscious, and the others dead.

The cold voice of a doctor had been the first I had heard as sense came back to me with the damp night air from the window blowing on my face: 

“He’s done for, I should say, you’d better take his depositions if he can speak.”

I had opened my eyes and seen some men carrying out the body of Hop Lee and the tiny pliable form of dear little Suzee that I should never see or clasp again.

The landlord had come up ashy-pale and shaking, with a note-book in his hand, and had questioned and re-questioned me, and I had answered until I fainted again.

Next, after a black gap, I came to beneath the surgeon’s probe which he was thrusting into my wound, as he would a fork into cold meat.

“He won’t get through, I should think; he has too much fever,” he was saying, in the regular callous professional voice.

“But I’m going to try the effect of this new antiseptic dressing, I want to see if it does harm or not.”

I opened my eyes and looked up at his hard, thin-lipped face, and he seemed somewhat disconcerted; but only jabbed his probe in a little deeper and remarked jocularly: 

“Ah, I see, you’re tougher than I thought.”

More oblivion, and when I next came to I knew that they had both been carried away from me and buried—­Hop Lee, and his wife beside him, and that that chapter in my life was, for ever and ever, closed.

Now I was in charge of a hospital nurse.  A horrible creature she was, lean and hard-faced, with a straight slit across her face for mouth, and little grey, cruel eyes.  Like a nightmare she hung round my bed, preventing me from getting better.

All the fiendish tortures and cruelties that she had witnessed within the hospital walls had, I suppose, made her the thing she was.

Days had passed, and very slowly a little strength had crept back into me, enough for me to see I was not getting well as quickly as my youth and strength would let me if there were no drawback.  I drew all my forces together to try and understand this, and then I noticed that regularly after each dose of physic I went back a little.

More fever, more pain in my shoulder, more delusions before the brain.  Each morning when the vitality within me had struggled through the evil effects of my medicine I was better, then came the harpy-faced nurse to the pillow—­my dose—­then pain and illness again.

The look on the face of the woman as I drank it was extraordinary.  A sly, pleased look, as one sees on the face of a schoolboy dismembering a living fly.

One day I took the glass as usual from her, but instead of raising it to my lips, turned it upside down through the window.

The woman turned red, and then livid.

“What does that mean, sir, may I ask?”