“It’s you who make me sleep, isn’t it,” he said, lying with closed eyes under the soft yet insistent pressure. “I’ve never thanked you.”
She did not reply. She did not want him to talk. But he still wanted to.
“I couldn’t thank you last night,” he said, “I can’t keep hold of my thoughts. And when morning comes I seem to have forgotten everything about the night. You are the nurse who takes care of me in the daytime, too, aren’t you?”
Again, for a moment, there was no reply; and then a voice came. “No; I am the night nurse. Go to sleep now.”
It was a voice gentle, cold and soft, like snow. It was not an English voice and he had heard it before. Where had he heard it? Rooks were cawing and he saw a blue ribbon rolling, rolling out across a spring-tide landscape. This voice was not like a blue ribbon; it was like snow. Yet, when he turned his head under her hand, he looked round at Adrienne Toner.
The first feeling that came uppermost in the medley that filled him at the sight of her was one of amused vexation. It was as if he went back to his beginnings with her, back to the rooks and the blue ribbon. “At it again!” was what he said to himself, and what he said aloud, absurdly, was: “Oh, come, now!”
She did not lift her hand, but there was trouble on her face as she looked back at him. “I hoped you wouldn’t see me, Mr. Oldmeadow,” she said.
He was reminded of Bacchus and the laying on of hands; but a classical analogy, even more ridiculous, came to him with her words. “Like Cupid and Psyche,” he said. “The other way round. It’s I who mustn’t look.”
The trouble on her face became more marked and he saw that she imagined him to be delirious. He was not quite himself, certainly, or he would not have greeted Adrienne Toner thus, and he made an effort to be more decorous and rational as he said, “I’m very glad to see you again. Safe and sound: you know.”
She had always had a singular little face, but it had never looked so singular as now, seen from below with shadows from the light behind cast so oddly over it. The end of her nose jutted from a blue shadow and her eyes lay in deep hollows of blue. All that he was sure of in her expression was the gravity with which she made up her mind to humour him. “We want you to be safe and sound, too. Please shut your eyes and go to sleep.”