And there in the starlight, I went over the whole serio-comedy, and I loathed my part in it.  He had been perfectly right to be angry with me and with all of us.  And I had been a hypocrite and a Pharisee, and had thanked God that I was not as other people, when the fact was that I was worse than the worst.  And although it wasn’t dignified to think of him going down the drain pipe, still—­no one could blame him for wanting to get away from us, and he was quite muscular enough to do it.

I was in the depths of self-abasement when I heard a sound behind me.  It was a long breath, quite audible, that ended in a groan.  I gripped the parapet and listened, while my heart pounded, and in a minute it came again.

I was terribly frightened.  Then—­I don’t know how I did it, but I was across the roof, kneeling beside the tent, where it stood against the chimney.  And there, lying prone among the flower pots, and almost entirely hidden, lay the man we had been looking for.

His head was toward me, and I reached out shakingly and touched his face.  It was cold, and my hand, when I drew it back, was covered with blood.

Chapter XXII.  IT WAS DELIRIUM

I was sure he was dead.  He did not move, and when I caught his hands and called him frantically, he did not hear me.  And so, with the horror over me, I half fell down the stairs and roused Jim in the studio.

They all came with lights and blankets, and they carried him into the tent and put him on the couch and tried to put whisky in his mouth.  But he could not swallow.  And the silence became more and more ominous until finally Anne got hysterical and cried, “He is dead!  Dead!” and collapsed on the roof.

But he was not.  Just as the lights in the tent began to have red rings around them and Jim’s voice came from away across the river, somebody said, “There, he swallowed that,” and soon after, he opened his eyes.  He muttered something that sounded like “Andean pinnacle” and lapsed into unconsciousness again.  But he was not dead!  He was not dead!

When the doctor came they made a stretcher out of one of Jim’s six-foot canvases—­it had a picture on it, and Jim was angry enough the next day—­and took him down to the studio.  We made it as much like a sick-room as we could, and we tried to make him comfortable.  But he lay without opening his eyes, and at dawn the doctor brought a consultant and a trained nurse.

The nurse was an offensively capable person.  She put us all out, and scolded Anne for lighting Japanese incense in the room—­although Anne explained that it is very reviving.  And she said that it was unnecessary to have a dozen people breathing up all the oxygen and asphyxiating the patient.  She was good-looking, too.  I disliked her at once.  Any one could see by the way she took his pulse—­just letting his poor hand hang, without any support—­that she was a purely mechanical creature, without heart.