After lying for three minutes he spoke with his inimitable liquid drawl. "When I think of all the years out of which I have squeezed enjoyment on the pettiest income--going here and going there--every nook of Europe, much of Asia and Africa--just managing to keep Thomson and myself--knowing every in and out, every rank and grade and caste, palace and hovel, château and garret, camp and atelier, knowing pictures, music, scenery, strange people and strange adventures, knowing my own kind and welcome among them--now basking like a lizard, now in action as though a tarantula had bit me--everywhere, desert and sea and city--and all on next to nothing!--making drawings when I had to (I did that one year in southern France; Carcassonne, Aigues-Mortes, Nîmes, and so forth), but usually fortunate in friends ... it seems that I might be able to manage on fifty thousand a year ... resume at the old house."
It was another week before he was told. He was growing impatient and suspicious.... The doctor did it, Thomson flunking for the first time in his existence. The doctor, having done it, came out of the room, drew a long breath, and accepted coffee from Mahomet with rather a shaking hand.
"He's perfectly game," said the doctor, "but I should say he's hard hit. However,"--he drank the coffee,--"there's one thing that a considerable experience with human nature has taught me, and that is, Colonel, that your born hedonist--and it's no disparagement to Mr. Ashendyne to call him that; quite the reverse--your born hedonist will remain hedonist still, though the heavens fall. He'll twist back to the pleasant. He's going through pretty bitter waters at the moment, but he'll get life somehow on the pleasurable plane again. All the same," mused the doctor, "he's undoubtedly suffering at present."
"I won't go in," said the Colonel. "Better fight such things out alone!"
But a little later Hagar went in. She waited an hour or two in her own room, sitting before a window, gazing with unseeing eyes. The heat swam and dazzled above countless flat, pale, parapetted roofs of countless houses. Palm and pepper and acacia and eucalyptus drooped in the airless day; there sounded a drone of voices; a great bird sailed slowly on stretched wings far overhead in a sky like brass. She turned and went to her father's room.