She said after a few seconds or a thousand years: "Darling, you shouldn't have dressed up with that moustache." He knew that he had to shut out the note in her voice that hung between a sob and a hysterical giggle. "It tickles," she said.
"I'm sorry," he said. "Remind me to get rid of it. Any time when I know what I'm doing."
She roused up beside him.
"Darling, you won't go off again now, will you?"
"No." He rolled over and rolled up. The movement sent his head whirling away from his body on a weird trajectory that revolted his stomach. He caught it somehow as it came back, and held it firmly in his hands. He said meticulously: "Look. You were dabbing my face with a wet cloth when I came to. You got the wet cloth from somewhere. Where?"
"There's a bathroom. Here."
Her fingers slid into his hand. He went stumbling through the dark where she led him, as if his limbs didn't belong to him any more.
Then he was alone for a while.
A while during which he used every trick and help that his experience could lend to him. Plus an overdose of aspirin from a bottle which he found in a cabinet over the washbowl.
Plus an effort of will that tore every nerve in his body to shreds and put it painstakingly together again. He never quite knew how he accomplished that. Part of it came from the native resilience of a perfect physique in pluperfect condition, the inestimable reserves of a phenomenal athlete who hadn't been out of training for sixteen years. Part of it came from an unconquerable power of mind that would have torn every cell of its habitation apart and remodelled it to achieve the resuscitation that had to be achieved. The Saint didn't know, and had no sort of inward power to waste on analysing it. He only knew that it took every atom of inward power that he could gouge out of himself, and left him feeling as if he had been drawn through a steam wringer at the end. But he had done what he had set himself to do; and he knew that also.