This is how it has befallen.  The last thing I remember of the old conditions was Rogers packing my things, and a sudden, awful, excruciating agony.  I lost consciousness, remained for days in a bemused, stupefied state, which I felt convinced was death, and found particularly pleasant.  At last I woke to a sense of bodily constriction and discomfort, and to the queer realisation that what I had taken for the Garden of Prosperpine was my own bedroom, and that the pale lady whom I had so confidently assumed was she who, crowned with calm leaves, “gathers all things mortal with cold, immortal hands” was no other than a blue-and-white-vested hospital nurse.

“What the——­” I began.

“Chut!” she said, flitting noiselessly to my side.  “You mustn’t talk.”  And then she poured something down my throat.  I lay back, wondering what it all meant.  Presently a grizzled and tanned man, wearing a narrow black tie, came into the room.  His face seemed oddly familiar.  The nurse whispered to him.  He came up to the bed, and asked me in French how I felt.

“I don’t know at all,” said I.

He laughed.  “That’s a good sign.  Let me see how you are getting on.”  He stuck a thermometer in my mouth and held my pulse.  These formalities completed, he turned up the bedclothes and did something with my body.  Only then did I realise that I was tightly bandaged.  My impressions grew clearer, and when he raised his face I recognised the doctor who had sat on the sofa with Anastasius Papadopoulos.

“Nothing could be better,” said he.  “Keep quiet, and all will be well.”

“Will you kindly explain?” I asked.

“You’ve had an operation.  Also a narrow escape.”

I smiled at him pityingly.  “What is the good of taking all this trouble?  Why are you wasting your time?”

He looked at me uncomprehendingly for a moment, and then he laughed as the light came to him.

“Oh, I understand!  Yes.  Your English doctors had told you you were going to die.  That an operation would be fatal—­so your good friend Madame Brandt informed us—­but we—­nous autres Francais—­are more enterprising.  Kill or cure.  We performed the operation—­we didn’t kill you—­and here you are—­cured.”

My heart sickened with a horrible foreboding.  A clamminess, such as others feel at the approach of death, spread over my brow and neck.

“Good God!” I cried, “you are not trying to tell me that I’m going to live?”

“Why, of course I am!” he exclaimed, brutally delighted.  “If nothing else kills you, you’ll live to be a hundred.”

“Oh, damn!” said I.  “Oh, damn!  Oh, damn!” and the tears of physical weakness poured down my cheeks.

“Ce sont des droles de gens, les Anglais!” I heard him whisper to the nurse before he left the room.

Belonging to a queer folk or not, I found the prospect more and more dismally appalling according as my mind regained its clarity.  It was the most overwhelming, piteous disappointment I have ever experienced in my life.  I cursed in my whimpering, invalid fashion.