"Francis, what's the matter?" I asked. "Why are you in bed? Why is there a nurse here?"
He had not let go of my hand, and now he clasped it more closely.
"I'll tell you the end first," he said; "quickly; just in one word. I'm dying. I can't live more than a few weeks."
There was a moment's silence, not prolonged, but at the end of it I felt that I had known this for years.
"Will you hear all about it from the beginning?" he asked. "Or would it bore you?"
He was so perfectly normal that there was really nothing left but to be normal too, or it may be that a great shock stuns your emotional faculties for a while. But I do not think it was that with me now. It was Francis's intense serenity and happiness that infected and enveloped me.
"I can't tell whether it would bore me or not," I said, "until I hear it."
"Then make yourself comfortable for about half an hour," he said. "But stop me when you like."
"It was very soon after I came out to Italy," he said, "that I kept getting attacks of the most infernal pain. Then they ceased to be attacks; at least, they attacked all the time. It was about then, when it was worst, that I wrote you a pig of a letter. Wasn't it?"