“Well,” he answered presently, rubbing his chin, “I was certainly once near losing hold of my will, if that’s what you mean. Of course, if I had let go——”
“But you didn’t.”
“No,” he said thoughtfully. “No—luckily.”
“You’re not taking credit for it?”
“Credit!” he exclaimed, surprised. “Why should I take credit for my freedom from a constitutional infirmity? In one way, indeed, I am only regretful that I am debarred that side of self-analysis.”
I could laugh lovelily, for the first time.
“Well,” I said, “will you tell me the story?”
“I never considered it in the light of a story,” answered the Regius Professor. “But, if it will amuse and distract you, I will make it one with pleasure. My memory of it, as an only experience in that direction, is quite vivid, I think I may say—” and he settled his spectacles, and began:
“It was during the period of my first appointment as Science Demonstrator to the Park Lane Polytechnic, a post which my little pamphlet on the Reef-building Serpulæ was instrumental in procuring me. I was a young man at the time, with a wide field of interests, but with few friends to help me in exploring it. My holidays I generally devoted to long, lonely tramps, knapsack on back, about the country.
“It was on one of these occasions that you must picture me entered into a solitary valley among the Shropshire hills. The season was winter; it was bitterly cold, and the prospect was of the dreariest. The interesting conformations of the land—the bone-structure, as I might say—were blunted under a thick pelt of snow, which made walking a labour. One never recognizes under such conditions the extent of one’s efforts, as inequalities of ground are without the contrast of surroundings to emphasize them, and one may be conscious of the strain of a gradient, and not know if it is of one foot in fifty or in five hundred.