in earnest, and woke in the middle of the night to find my brother standing by my bed, making noises with his mouth.  I thought that he had gone mad, and would kill me perhaps, but after a time he went back to bed saying all the bad words he knew.  The excitement had made me wide awake, and I tossed about thinking of the cracked ceiling above my head.  The room was quite dark, and I could see nothing, so that it might be bulging over me without my knowing it.  I stood up in bed and stretched up my arm, but I could not reach the ceiling; yet when I lay down again I felt as though it had sunk so far, that it was touching my hair, and I found it difficult to breathe in such a small space.  I was afraid to move for fear of bringing it down upon me, and in a short while the pressure upon my body became unbearable, and I shrieked out for help.  Some one came in and lit the gas, and found me looking very foolish and my brother delirious.  I fell asleep almost immediately, but was conscious through my dreams that the gas was still alight and that they were watching by my brother’s bedside.

In the morning he was very ill and I was no longer feverish, so it was decided to move me back into my own bedroom.  I was wrapped up in the bedclothes and told to sit still while the bed was moved.  I sat in an armchair, feeling like a bundle of old clothes, and looking at the cracks in the ceiling which seemed to me like roads.  I knew that I had already lost all importance as an invalid, but I was very happy nevertheless.  For from the window of one of my little houses I was watching the boys going to school, and my heart was warm with the knowledge of my own emancipation.  As my legs hung down from the chair I found it hard to keep my slippers on my stockingless feet.

III

There followed for me a period of deep and unbroken satisfaction.  I was soon considered well enough to get up, and I lived pleasantly between the sofa and the fireside waiting on my brother’s convalescence, for it had been settled that I should go away with him to the country for a change of air.  I read Dickens and Dumas in English, and made up long stories in which I myself played important but not always heroic parts.  By means of intellectual exercises of this kind I achieved a tranquillity like that of an old man, fearing nothing, desiring nothing, regretting nothing.  I no longer reckoned the days or the hours, I content to enjoy a passionless condition of being that asked no questions and sought none of me, nor did I trouble to number my journeys in the world of infinite shadows.  But in that long hour of peace I realised that in some inexplicable way I was interested in the body of a little boy, whose hands obeyed my unspoken wishes, whose legs sprawled before me on the sofa.  I knew that before I met him, this boy, whose littleness surprised me, had suffered ill dreams in a nameless world, and now, worn out with tears and humiliation and dread of life, he