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THIS IS ALL he had busied himself in this futile search for something certain about it. He heard a hundred voices all crying differently, and knew not to which he should listen.

He used to make attempts, from time to time, to pull himself together; he made one now.

'What does all this concern me?' he said aloud. 'I'm not going to die. Holling said so. Holling gave me twenty years, with reasonable care, and he knows what he is talking about.' He pushed the books aside contemptuously. 'Pack of nonsense!' He picked up instead a catalogue that his wine merchant had sent him. There was some port of a fairly recent vintage that he wished to put down. 'That's it,' he said, marking the catalogue with pencil, 'we'll say fifty dozen.' He rubbed his chilly hands together, and hummed a light tune.

At five his man Jackson brought him in a glass of whisky-and-water, carefully measured. Wyatt had got 35