One
afternoon, however, about three weeks after he had regained
consciousness, the nurse who tended him, and who had been very kind to
him, made some little rallying sally which amused him; he laughed, and as
he did so, she clapped her hands and told him he would be a man again.
The spark of hope was kindled, and again he wished to live. Almost from
that moment his thoughts began to turn less to the horrors of the past,
and more to the best way of meeting the future.
His worst pain was on behalf of his father and mother, and how he should
again face them. It still seemed to him that the best thing both for him
and them would be that he should sever himself from them completely, take
whatever money he could recover from Pryer, and go to some place in the
uttermost parts of the earth, where he should never meet anyone who had
known him at school or college, and start afresh. Or perhaps he might go
to the gold fields in California or Australia, of which such wonderful
accounts were then heard; there he might even make his fortune, and
return as an old man many years hence, unknown to everyone, and if so, he
would live at Cambridge. As he built these castles in the air, the spark
of life became a flame, and he longed for health, and for the freedom
which, now that so much of his sentence had expired, was not after all
very far distant.
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