"Hammond," I said one day, "I have never yet asked you. How did I give my evidence at the inquest?"
"Like a doctor and a sane man."
"That's good. But it was a difficult course to steer. You conducted the post-mortem. Did any peculiarity in the dead man's face strike you?"
"Nothing but this: that the excessive contraction of the bicipital muscles had brought the features into such forcible contact with the bars as to cause bruising and actual abrasion. He must have been dead some little time when you found him."
"And nothing else? You noticed nothing else in his face—a sort of obliteration of what makes one human, I mean?"
"Oh, dear, no! nothing but the painful constriction that marks any ordinary fatal attack of angina pectoris.—There's a rum breach of promise case in the paper to-day. You should read it; it'll make you laugh."
I had no more inclination to laugh than to sigh; but I accepted the change of subject with an equanimity now habitual to me.
* * * * *
One morning I sat up in bed, and knew that consciousness was wide awake in me once more. It had slept, and now rose refreshed, but trembling. Looking back, all in a flutter of new responsibility, along the misty path by way of which I had recently loitered, I shook with an awful thankfulness at sight of the pitfalls I had skirted and escaped—of the demons my witlessness had baffled.
The joy of life was in my heart again, but chastened and made pitiful by experience.