For the grief was on me still of having lost my love and lover at the moment she was mine.  With the power of fate upon me, and the black cauldron of the wizard’s death boiling in my heated brain, I had no faith in the tales they told.  I believed that Lorna was in the churchyard, while these rogues were lying to me.  For with strength of blood like mine, and power of heart behind it, a broken bone must burn itself.

Mine went hard with fires of pain, being of such size and thickness; and I was ashamed of him for breaking by reason of a pistol-ball, and the mere hug of a man.  And it fetched me down in conceit of strength; so that I was careful afterwards.

All this was a lesson to me.  All this made me very humble; illness being a thing, as yet, altogether unknown to me.  Not that I cried small, or skulked, or feared the death which some foretold; shaking their heads about mortification, and a green appearance.  Only that I seemed quite fit to go to heaven, and Lorna.  For in my sick distracted mind (stirred with many tossings), like the bead in the spread of frog-spawn carried by the current, hung the black and central essence of my future life.  A life without Lorna; a tadpole life.  All stupid head; and no body.

Many men may like such life; anchorites, fakirs, high-priests, and so on; but to my mind, it is not the native thing God meant for us.  My dearest mother was a show, with crying and with fretting.  The Doones, as she thought, were born to destroy us.  Scarce had she come to some liveliness (though sprinkled with tears, every now and then) after her great bereavement, and ten years’ time to dwell on it—­when lo, here was her husband’s son, the pet child of her own good John, murdered like his father!  Well, the ways of God were wonderful!

So they were, and so they are; and so they ever will be.  Let us debate them as we will, are ways are His, and much the same; only second-hand from Him.  And I expected something from Him, even in my worst of times, knowing that I had done my best.

This is not edifying talk—­as our Nonconformist parson says, when he can get no more to drink—­therefore let me only tell what became of Lorna.  One day, I was sitting in my bedroom, for I could not get downstairs, and there was no one strong enough to carry me, even if I would have allowed it.

Though it cost me sore trouble and weariness, I had put on all my Sunday clothes, out of respect for the doctor, who was coming to bleed me again (as he always did twice a week); and it struck me that he had seemed hurt in his mind, because I wore my worst clothes to be bled in—­for lie in bed I would not, after six o’clock; and even that was great laziness.

I looked at my right hand, whose grasp had been like that of a blacksmith’s vice; and it seemed to myself impossible that this could be John Ridd’s.  The great frame of the hand was there, as well as the muscles, standing forth like the guttering of a candle, and the broad blue veins, going up the back, and crossing every finger.  But as for colour, even Lorna’s could scarcely have been whiter; and as for strength, little Ensie Doone might have come and held it fast.  I laughed as I tried in vain to lift the basin set for bleeding me.