Fortune, which had smiled upon him consistently all his life, did not desert him in the end.
His harshest critics did not doubt that, had he lived, he would have retrieved himself.

Even Lucius Wilson did not see in this accident the disaster he had once foretold.
When a great man dies in his prime there is no surgeon who can say whether he did well; whether or not the future was his, as it seemed to be.

The mind that society had come to regard as a powerful and reliable machine, dedicated to its service, may for a long time have been sick within itself and bent upon its own destruction.
EPILOGUE Professor Wilson had been living in London for six years and he was just back from a visit to America.

One afternoon, soon after his return, he put on his frock-coat and drove in a hansom to pay a call upon Hilda Burgoyne, who still lived at her old number, off Bedford Square.

He and Miss Burgoyne had been fast friends for a long time.