Voices in the other bedroom! The doctor had arrived and was talking to the second nurse. They went in together. Felix lay a changed man, horribly aged. He was a man who had suddenly learned that in order to live it was necessary to breathe, and that breathing may be an intensely difficult operation of mechanics. His lined, wrinkled face was drawn with the awful anxieties incident to breathing, and with the acute pain in both lungs. The enemy was growing in strength and Felix was losing strength, but he could not surrender. He must continue to struggle, despite the odds, and there was no referee to stop the fight, either on the ground that it had developed into an assassination or on any other ground. The brutality had to proceed. And the sun streamed through the window; and outside, from the promenade where the idlers were strolling and the band was playing, the window looked exactly the same as all the other windows of the enormous hotel.
After an examination, Dr. Samson injected morphia. The result was almost instantaneous. The victim, freed from the anxiety of the pain, could devote the whole of his energy to breathing. He sighed, and smiled as if he had entered paradise. He gave a few short, faint coughs, like the cough of a nervous veiled woman in church, and said in a hoarse, feeble, whispering voice:
"You must understand, doctor, it was all my fault. I insisted, and what could she do?" The two nurses modestly bent their gaze.
"Yes, yes," the doctor concurred.
Felix had already made the same announcement several times.
"But I want everybody to know," he persisted.
"Yes, yes," said the doctor. "I shall give you some oxygen this morning. It will be here in a minute. That will do you a lot of good. You'll see."
Lilian was the calmest person in the room. She had decided that there was no hope, and had braced herself and become matter-of-fact. She was full of health, power, and magnificent youth, and the living seed of Felix was within her. She quietly kissed Felix on his damp cheek; no gold now glistened in his half-empty mouth. She returned to her own bedroom, and Dr. Samson followed.
"He's much worse," she said firmly to the doctor.
"He is not better," said the doctor. "But there is always hope."