Stefan felt grateful for her normal, cheery manner, and for Mary's sudden drowsiness; they seemed to cover what he felt to be a failure in himself. He had been unable to find one word to say about the baby.
At breakfast, served by the sleepy but beaming Lily, Stefan was dazed by the bearing of doctor and nurse. These two women, after a night spent in work of an intensity and scope beyond his powers to gage, appeared as fresh and normal as if they had just risen from sleep, while he, unshaved and rumpled, could barely control his racked nerves and heavy head, across which doctor and nurse discussed their case with animation.
“We are all going to bed, Mr. Byrd,” said the doctor at last, noting his exhausted aspect. “I shall get two or, three hours' nap on the sofa before going back to town, and I hope you will take a thorough rest.”
Stefan rose rather dizzily from his unfinished meal.
“Please take my room,” he said, “I couldn't stay in the house—I'm going out.” He found the atmosphere of alert efficiency created by these women utterly insupportable. The house stifled him with its teeming feminine life. In it he felt superfluous, futile. Hurrying out, he stumbled down the slope and, stripping, dived into the water. Its cold touch robbed him of thought; he became at once merely one of Nature's straying children returned again to her arms.
Swimming back, he drew on his clothes, and mounting to the garden, threw himself face down upon the grass, and fell asleep under the morning sun.
He dreamed that a drum was calling him. Its beat, muffled and irregular, yet urged him forward. A flag waved dazzlingly before his eyes; its folds stifled him. He tried to move, yet could not—the drum called ever more urgently. He started awake, to find himself on his back, the sun beating into his face, and the doctor's machine chugging down the lane.