DOCTOR MURCHISON was lying on his bed, gazing at the ceiling. It was about six o’clock in the evening, and the room was in shadow, for it faced north, and only the morning sunshine penetrated the narrow-barred window broken by the golf ball of Colonel Rickaby, which was its sole communication with the outer air. The room was furnished with a sort of bare comfort, efficient but quite impersonal. There were two padded chairs and a table with rounded corners and legs. The walls of the room were also padded with gray felt.
He lay back breathing quietly, an acrid taste in his mouth. For the moment he could only realize his physical condition. His mind was not yet at work. Half phrases, catchwords of the old life, from which he had so long been shut off, came and went. “The morning after the ni
