LIFE AT FIRST-HAND
I
Pip reached London that evening to find the great gloomy house in Westock Square shuttered and silent. His father's brougham had driven up as usual at lunch-time, after the morning round, and its owner had been discovered lying in a dead faint inside it. He had been carried into the house, to die—not even in his bed. Death, with whom he had waged a vicarious and more than commonly successful warfare for thirty-one years, had conquered at last, and that, too, with grim irony, in the very arena of the dead man's triumphs—his own consulting-room. The great physician lay peacefully on an operating-couch near the darkened window, surrounded by life-saving appliances and books that tell how death may be averted.
His affairs were in a hopeless tangle. He had risked almost
