After supper he went up to his study to prepare for the Sunday.

He had fully made up his mind what he would do, and he wanted to do it in a manner that would cast no reproach on his ministry, which he respected with sensitive reverence.
He shut the door and began his preparation by walking up and down, as his custom was, thinking out the details of the service, his sermon, the exact wording of certain phrases he wished to make.
He had been walking thus back and forth half a dozen times when he felt the same acute pain in his side that had seized him when he fainted in church at the evening service.

It passed away and he resumed his work, thinking it was only a passing disorder.

But before he could turn again in his walk he felt a dizziness that whirled everything in the room about him.

He clutched at a chair and was conscious of having missed it, and then he fell forward in such a way that he lay partly on the couch and on the floor, and was unconscious.
How long he had been in this condition he did not know when he came to himself.