Page:Phillpotts - The Grey Room (Macmillan, 1921).djvu/74

Rh that she would never hear Tom's long stride again.

It often broke into a run, she remembered, as he approached her; and she would often run toward him, too—to banish the space that separated them. She blamed herself bitterly that she had decreed to sleep in her old nursery. She had loved it so, and the small bed that had held her from childhood; yet, if she had slept with him, this might not have happened.

"To think that only a wall separated us!" she kept saying to herself. "And I sleeping and dreaming of him, and he dying only a few yards away."

Death was no disaster for Tom, so the doctor had said. What worthless wisdom! And perhaps not even wisdom. Who knows what a disaster death may be? And who would ever know what he had felt at the end, or what his mind had suffered if time had been given him to understand that he was going to die? She worked herself into agony, lost self-control at last and wept, with Jane Bond's arms round her.

"And I was so troubled, because I thought he had been called back to his ship!" she said.

"He's called to a better place than a ship, dear love," sobbed Jane.

After they left her, Sir Walter and Dr. Mannering had entered the Grey Room for a moment and, standing there, spoke together.

"I have a strange consciousness that I am living over the past again," declared the physician.