“Then I owe my life to her?”

“Positively.”

“What do you want me to do?”

The doctor thought this query gave hopeful promise.  “Always remember the fact.  She is something different.  When I told her that there were no available nurses this side of Hong-Kong, she offered her services at once, and broke her journey.  And I need not tell you that her hotel bill is running on the same as yours.”

“Do you want me to tell her that I am grateful?”

“Well, aren’t you?”

“I don’t know; I really don’t know.”

“Look here, my boy, that attitude is all damned nonsense.  Here you are, young, sound, with a heart that will recover in no time, provided you keep liquor out of it.  And you talk like that!  What the devil have you been up to, to land in this bog?” It was a cast at random.

His guardian angel warned Spurlock to speak carefully.  “I have been very unhappy.”

“So have we all.  But we get over it.  And you will.”

After a moment Spurlock said:  “Perhaps I am an ungrateful dog.”

“That’s better.  Remember, if there’s anything you’d like to get off your chest, doctors and priests are in the same boat.”

With no little effort—­for the right words had a way of tumbling back out of reach—­he marshalled his phrases, and as he uttered them, closed his eyes to lessen the possibility of a break.  “I’m only a benighted fool; and having said that, I have said everything.  I’m one of those unfortunate duffers who have too much imagination—­the kind who build their own chimeras and then run away from them.  How long shall I be kept in this bed?”

“That’s particularly up to you.  Ten days should see you on your feet.  But if you don’t want to get up, maybe three times ten days.”

There had never been, from that fatal hour eight months gone down to this, the inclination to confess.  He had often read about it, and once he had incorporated it in a story, that invisible force which sent men to prison and to the gallows, when a tongue controlled would have meant liberty indefinite.  As for himself, there had never been a touch of it.  It was less will than education.  Even in his fevered hours, so the girl had said, his tongue had not betrayed him.  Perhaps that sealed letter was a form of confession, and thus relieved him on that score.  And yet that could not be:  it was a confession only in the event of his death.  Living, he knew that he would never send that letter.

His conscience, however, was entirely another affair.  He could neither stifle nor deaden that.  It was always jabbing him with white-hot barbs, waking or sleeping.  But it never said:  “Tell someone!  Tell someone!” Was he something of a moral pervert, then?  Was it what he had lost—­the familiar world—­rather than what he had done?

He stared dully at the footrail.  For the present the desire to fly was gone.  No doubt that was due to his helplessness.  When he was up and about, the idea of flight would return.  But how far could he fly on a few hundred?  True, he might find a job somewhere; but every footstep from behind...!