The Nest, The White Pagoda, The Suicide, A Forsaken Temple, Miss Jones and the Masterpiece

It seemed suitable, when making a selection of short stories for publication in book form, to include my first attempt with my last, and therefore the very juvenile production— Miss Jones and the Masterpiece —finds a place with the others.
My thanks are due to the Editors of the Century Magazine , Scribners' Magazine , and the English Review , for allowing me to republish the stories that appeared in their pages.
November, 1912.
He seemed to have had no time for thinking before he sank into a corner of the railway carriage and noted, with a satisfaction under the circumstances perhaps trivial, that he would have it to himself for the swift hour down to the country. Satisfactions of any sort seemed inappropriate, an appanage that he should have left behind him for ever on stepping from the great specialist's door in Wimpole Street two hours ago. When a man has but a month—at most two months—to live, small hopes and fears should drop from him: he should be stripped, as it were, for the last solitary wrestle in the arena of death.
But the drive, from the doctor's to the city and from there to Paddington, had seemed unusually full of life's solicitations. The soft, strained eyes of an over-laden horse, appealing in patience from the shade of dusty blinkers; the dismal degradation of a music-hall poster—a funny man with reddened nose and drunken hat, as appealing in his slavery as the horse; the vaporous blue-green silhouettes of the Park on a silvery sky;—he had found himself responding to these with pity, repugnance and pleasure as normally as if they meant for him now what they always would have meant. That such impressions were so soon to cease must change all their meaning,—at least, so one would have supposed; he began to think of that and to wonder a little over the apparent stoicism of those intervening hours; but, while the mood had lasted, the fact that he had come to the end of things, that there was a pit dug across his path, had done hardly more than skim on the outskirts of his alert yet calm receptivity. He seemed never to have noticed more, never to have been more conscious of the outer world and so little conscious of himself.