Horses'
hoofs were clattering, and she was lurching somewhere through the night.
Next, light and voices, and a smell of iodoform. This must be the
receiving hospital, she thought, this the operating table, those the
doctors. They were examining Joe. One of them, a dark-eyed,
dark-bearded, foreign-looking man, rose up from bending over the table.
"Never saw anything like it," he was saying to another man. "The whole
back of the skull."
Her lips were hot and dry, and there was an intolerable ache in her
throat. But why didn't she cry? She ought to cry; she felt it incumbent
upon her. There was Lottie (there had been another change in the dream),
across the little narrow cot from her, and she was crying. Somebody was
saying something about the coma of death. It was not the foreign-looking
doctor, but somebody else. It did not matter who it was. What time was
it? As if in answer, she saw the faint white light of dawn on the
windows.
"I was going to be married to-day," she said to Lottie.
And from across the cot his sister wailed, "Don't, don't!" and, covering
her face, sobbed afresh.
This, then, was the end of it all--of the carpets, and furniture, and the
little rented house; of the meetings and walking out, the thrilling
nights of starshine, the deliciousness of surrender, the loving and the
being loved.
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