“Look out!” he shrieked aloud....

* * * * *

The revulsion was instant.  As if a cold slow billow had broken over him, he came to to find that he was lying in his bed, that the mist and horror that had for so long enwrapped him had departed, that he was Paul Oleron, and that he was sick, naked, helpless, and unutterably abandoned and alone.  His faculties, though weak, answered at last to his calls upon them; and he knew that it must have been a hideous nightmare that had left him sweating and shaking thus.

Yes, he was himself, Paul Oleron, a tired novelist, already past the summit of his best work, and slipping downhill again empty-handed from it all.  He had struck short in his life’s aim.  He had tried too much, had over-estimated his strength, and was a failure, a failure....

It all came to him in the single word, enwrapped and complete; it needed no sequential thought; he was a failure.  He had missed....

And he had missed not one happiness, but two.  He had missed the ease of this world, which men love, and he had missed also that other shining prize for which men forgo ease, the snatching and holding and triumphant bearing up aloft of which is the only justification of the mad adventurer who hazards the enterprise.  And there was no second attempt.  Fate has no morrow.  Oleron’s morrow must be to sit down to profitless, ill-done, unrequired work again, and so on the morrow after that, and the morrow after that, and as many morrows as there might be....

He lay there, weakly yet sanely considering it....

And since the whole attempt had failed, it was hardly worth while to consider whether a little might not be saved from the general wreck.  No good would ever come of that half-finished novel.  He had intended that it should appear in the autumn; was under contract that it should appear; no matter; it was better to pay forfeit to his publishers than to waste what days were left.  He was spent; age was not far off; and paths of wisdom and sadness were the properest for the remainder of the journey....

If only he had chosen the wife, the child the faithful friend at the fireside, and let them follow an ignis fatuus that list!...

In the meantime it began to puzzle him exceedingly what he should be so weak, that his room should smell so overpoweringly of decaying vegetable matter, and that his hand, chancing to stray to his face in the darkness, should encounter a beard.

“Most extraordinary!” he began to mutter to himself.  “Have I been ill?  Am I ill now?  And if so, why have they left me alone?...  Extraordinary!...”

He thought he heard a sound from the kitchen or bathroom.  He rose a little on his pillow, and listened....  Ah!  He was not alone, then!  It certainly would have been extraordinary if they had left him ill and alone—­Alone?  Oh no.  He would be looked after.  He wouldn’t be left, ill, to shift for himself.  If everybody else had forsaken him, he could trust Elsie Bengough, the dearest chum he had, for that ... bless her faithful heart!