But when he had tossed the last bright word after the others, as I had seen cashiers in banks, weighing mounds of coin, drop a final sovereign into the tray, I knew a sudden prudent alarm.
"My dear master, how, after all, are you going to do it?
It's infinitely noble, but what time it will take, what patience and independence, what assured, what perfect conditions! Oh for a lone isle in a tepid sea!" "Isn't this practically a lone isle, and aren't you, as an encircling medium, tepid enough ?" he asked, alluding with a laugh to the wonder of my young admiration and the narrow limits of his little provincial home.
"Time isn't what I've lacked hitherto: the question hasn't been to find it, but to use it.

Of course my illness made, while it lasted, a great hole--but I dare say there would have been a hole at any rate.

The earth we tread has more pockets than a billiard-table.

The great thing is now to keep on my feet." "That's exactly what I mean." Neil Paraday looked at me with eyes--such pleasant eyes as he had--in which, as I now recall their expression, I seem to have seen a dim imagination of his fate.

He was fifty years old, and his illness had been cruel, his convalescence slow.