"Dear Kitty—of course I love you."
It was over. She was gone. She had not asked for his good-night kiss. It was like a sword between them.
He drew a long breath, lifting his head.
Alone. There was ecstasy in the thought.
He walked out into the garden and looked up at the stars as he walked. There had been no stars in the nest.
He didn't think of death. There had been too much thinking of death; that was one of the things he was tired of. Still less did he want to think of Kitty or of himself.
He looked at the stars and thought of them, but not in any manner emotional or poetical; he thought of astronomical facts, dry, sound, delightful facts: he looked at the darkened trees and dim flowers and thought of botany: the earth he trod on was full of scientific interest; the Pierrots, the fairies and the angels—yes, the angels too—were vanished. He hungered for impersonal interests and information.
Kitty would, indeed, have thought him mad; after the calming walk he came in, lit a cigar and sat for hours studying.
Before Kitty was up next morning he was on his way back to London to see the great specialist.
It was a long visit he paid, an astonishing visit, though the astonishment, really, was not his; life had seemed deeply to have promised something when he had ceased to think of death—when he had ceased to want death, even. That strong beating of his heart had been a mute forestalling. The astonishment was the good, great doctor's, and it was reiterated with an emphasis that showed something of wounded professional pride beneath it. It was, indeed, humiliating to have made such a complete mistake, to have seen only one significance in symptoms that, to far-sightedness clairvoyant enough, should have hinted, at all events, at another, and, as a result, to have doomed to speedy death a man now obviously as far from dying as oneself: "I can't forgive myself for robbing you of a month of life," the doctor said. "A month with death at the end of it can't be called a month of life."