Now then, if it won't be too wearisome to you, the whole story. He sat, lean and erect in his big chair, a hand resting loosely on each knee, in one spectacles, in the other a dangling pocket handkerchief. And the dark, sallow, aquiline, formidable figure, with its oddly changing voice, re-told the whole story from the beginning. I mean that after waking I felt much better, more alert. It was just like being a boy again.
Influenza dispirits one so.
Mr. Bethany gazed without stirring. He stuck out his head. I remember, for instance I knelt down to read an old tombstone. And an epitaph. And there was a long jagged crack in the stone, like the black line you know one sees after lightning.