“We’ll have to wait until he can tell us himself,” said Miss Winwood later to the doctor.

“We’ll have to wait a long time,” said he.

CHAPTER IX

The London physician arrived, sat up with Paul most of the night, and went away the next morning saying that he was a dead man.  Dr. Fuller, however, advanced the uncontrovertible opinion that a man was not dead till he died; and Paul was not dead yet.  As a matter of fact, Paul did not die.  If he had done so, there would have been an end of him and this history would never have been written.  He lay for many days at the gates of Death, and Miss Winwood, terribly fearful lest they should open and the mysterious, unconscious shape of beauty and youth should pass through, had all the trouble promised her by the doctor.  But the gates remained shut.  When Paul took a turn for the better, the London physician came down again and declared that he was living in defiance of all the laws of pathology, and with a graceful compliment left the case in the hands of Dr. Fuller.  When his life was out of danger, Dr. Fuller attributed the miracle to the nurses; Ursula Winwood attributed it to Dr. Fuller; the London physician to Paul’s superb constitution; and Paul himself, perhaps the most wisely, to the pleasant-faced, masterful lady who had concentrated on his illness all the resources of womanly tenderness.

But it was a long time before Paul was capable of formulating such an opinion.  It was a long time before he could formulate any opinion at all.  When not delirious or comatose, he had the devil of pleurisy tearing at the wall of his lung like a wild cat.  Only gradually did he begin to observe and to question.  That noiseless woman in coot blue and white was a nurse.  He knew that.  So he must be in hospital.  But the room was much smaller than a hospital ward; and where were the other patients?  The question worried him for a whole morning.  Then there was a pink-faced man in gold spectacles, Obviously the doctor.  Then there was a sort of nurse whom he liked very much, but she was not in uniform.  Who could she be?  He realized that he was ill, as weak as a butterfly; and the pain when he coughed was agonizing.  It was all very odd.  How had he come here?  He remembered walking along a dusty road in the blazing sun, his head bursting, every limb a moving ache.  He also vaguely remembered being awakened at night by a thunder storm as he lay snugly asleep beneath a hedge.  The German Ocean had fallen down upon him.  He was quite sure it was the German Ocean, because he had fixed it in his head by repeating “the North Sea or German Ocean.”  Mixing up delirious dream with fact, he clearly remembered the green waves rearing themselves up first, an immeasurable wall, then spreading a translucent canopy beneath the firmament and then descending in awful deluge.  He had a confused memory of morning sunshine, of a