"Dot! I stood up with heart and brain in a whirl. Dot! 1840. Five-and-twenty years ago, and Dot had died but half-an-hour before. What did it mean? What did it mean?
"A sudden fear of the solitude and silence of the place fell upon me. But for shame I would have turned tail on it then and there. As it was, scorn of my own suspicions made me return to the house. How still it was! how desolate. I remember standing at the outer door listening in vain for some sound within; I remember seeing my revolver and writing-case on the table in the outer room; I remember nerving myself to push open the inner door, but I remember no more.
* * * * *
"They told me in hospital that I must have tripped over the broken flooring between the two rooms, and in falling have cut my head against the lintel.
"Perhaps I did. Perhaps I didn't. I only know that something--God knows what--stood between me and my madness, so that when I came to myself it was gone for ever. In its place had grown up a craving to live--to hear, to see, to know, to understand.
"As I got better I used to lie and cry like a woman. Then the other fellows would say it was all weakness, and that I must be a man and bear up. And sometimes I would lie and smile. Then they said I was a trump with more pluck than they had. And as often as not I wasn't thinking of myself or my own troubles at all, but of brave little Dot and her desire for a puff-puff-boom.
"They sent me down the Indus to Bombay, so as to avoid the rattle of the train, for my head was still weak. We stuck on a sandbank at Sukkhur, being made unmanageable by two flats we were towing. They were laden mostly with cargo, but carried a good many third-class passengers. I don't know why I had risen from my sick-bed full of a great curiosity, but I had. Somehow I never seemed to have looked at life before, whereas now everything interested me. So I went down to the flats and talked to the people. There was a cabin on one, carrying a few second-class passengers, and as I was walking along a gangway between some bales I saw an Englishwoman, holding a child on her lap. The crouching attitude struck me as familiar; I stopped and spoke about the weather or something. She looked up, and then I knew where I had seen that attitude, for it was Dot's mother. I don't think I should have recognised her--for she was an old woman with grey hair--but for the remembrance of the changed look which, as you may recollect, she had when I roused her in the bungalow by touching her arm.
"'Is that your child?' I asked courteously, for, poorly dressed as she was, her face was unmistakably refined.
"'No!' she replied; and I recognised the somewhat querulous voice. 'It's my granddaughter, but I am as fond of her as if she were my own--almost.'
"As she spoke she shifted the child's head higher up on her arm, and I saw a mass of fluffy light gold curls.