“Yes, sir.”
Jessop left the room.
“Now how on earth did he know that?” he queried as he walked across the hall.
The curtains had been drawn when Nicholas had been carried into the room. The knowledge, for a man unable to move from his chair, seemed little short of uncanny.
“A man can face odds if he is a man, and remake his life.”
The words repeated themselves in Nicholas’s brain. Each syllable was like the incisive tap of a hammer. They fell on a wound lately dealt.
A little scene, barely ten days old, reconstructed itself in his memory. The stage was the one he now occupied; the position the same. But another actor was present, a big rugged man, clad in a shabby overcoat,—a man with keen eyes, a grim mouth, and flexible sensitive hands.
“I regret to tell you that, humanly speaking, you have no more than a year to live.”
The man had looked past him as he spoke the words. He had had his back to the light, but Nicholas had seen something almost inscrutable in his expression.
Nicholas’s voice had followed close upon the words, politely ironical.