V
B
etween
each act of man there is a breathing-space, a pause, time for reassessment, just as Winter intervenes between the harvest and the sowing-time, or night between one day and the next. It is in that pause that a man may shuffle together the cards of his past experience and deal himself a new hand for the coming game.
I lay in my bed, sick at heart, yet in a way glad that illness should have taken from me the necessity for action, an old man while I was yet young, dreaming and thinking of the past, and of what future that past might well produce before my hand was finally played out.
My life had never been a full one, a rich one, though it had been a busy one. Now I realised that I had gone wrong in putting things before people, my professional ambition before my family, before
