Saturday.—­Now comes the tragic thing. That very night I realised that he was right. There is something wrong with my heart.  It is too long.  It is too wide.  It is too thick.  It is out of place.  It would be difficult to say exactly where the measurements are wrong, but one has a sort of sense ... you know?...  One can feel that it is too large....  A swollen feeling....  Somehow I never felt this before; I never even felt that it was there ... but now I always know that it is there—­trying to get out....  I put my hand on it and can feel it definitely expanding—­like a football bladder.  Sometimes I think it wants to get out at my collar-bone; sometimes I think it will blow out under my bottom rib; sometimes some other way.  It is terrible....

I have had the prescription made up.

Sunday.—­The way it beats!  Sometimes very fast and heavy and emphatic, like a bad barrage of 5.9’s.  Fortunately my watch has a second-hand, so that I can time it—­forty-five to the half-minute, ninety-five to the full minute.  Then I know that the end is very near; everyone knows that the normal rate for a healthy adult heart is seventy-two.  Then sometimes it goes very slow, very dignified and faint, as when some great steamer glides in at slow speed to her anchorage, and the engines thump in a subdued and profound manner very far away, or as when at night the solemn tread of some huge policeman is heard, remote and soft and dilated—­I mean dilatory, or as when—­But you see what I mean.

Monday.—­How was it, I wonder, that all this was hidden from me for so long?  And now what am I to do?  I am a doomed man.  With a heart like this I cannot last long.  I have resigned my clubs; I have given up my work.  I can think of nothing but this dull pain, this heavy throbbing at my side.  My work—­ha!  Yesterday I met another young doctor at tea.  He asked me if there was any “murmur.”  I said I did not know—­no one had told me.  But after tea I went away and listened.  Yes, there was a murmur; I could hear it plainly.  I told the young doctor.  He said that murmurs were not considered so important nowadays.  What matters is “the reaction of the heart to work.”  By that test I am doomed indeed.  But the murmur is better.

Tuesday.—­I have told Anton Gregorovitch Gregorski.  He says he has a heart too.

Wednesday.—­I have been learning things to-day.  I am worse even than the doctor thought.  In a reference book in the dining-room there is a medical dictionary.  It says:  “Dilatation leads to dropsy, shortness of breath and blueness of the face.”  I have got some of those already.  I have never seen a face so blue.  It is like the sea in the early morning.

Thursday.—­The heart is bigger again to-day—­about an inch each way.  The weight of it is terrible to carry....  I have to take taxis....  This evening it was going at thirty-two to the minute....