THE ACCUSING FINGER Of my wanderings after I left the Museum on that black and dismal _dies irae_, I have but a dim recollection.

But I must have travelled a quite considerable distance, since it wanted an hour or two to the time for returning to the surgery, and I spent the interval walking swiftly through streets and squares, unmindful of the happenings around, intent only on my present misfortune, and driven by a natural impulse to seek relief in bodily exertion.

For mental distress sets up, as it were, a sort of induced current of physical unrest; a beneficent arrangement, by which a dangerous excess of emotional excitement may be transformed into motor energy, and so safely got rid of.

The motor apparatus acts as a safety-valve to the psychical; and if the engine races for a while, with the onset of bodily fatigue the emotional pressure-gauge returns to a normal reading.
And so it was with me.

At first I was conscious of nothing but a sense of utter bereavement, of the shipwreck of all my hopes.