I tried to see the future, sitting there. I thought the peace and the moonlight might help me, it seemed to make things so beautifully abstract and impersonal that the planning hardly hurt at all. In all my plans I never contemplated Walter Markham living and loving me, and believing I had come to him because I loved him. I saw myself leaving the hospital and going back to Cromer Court. I knew that Cheneston's sympathy and gratitude would be my particular Garden of Gethsemane.
I wondered a little why Life and Love should always peck and beat and burn me, and I wondered for the first time without resentment.
The house surgeon came in; he wore a long white linen coat over pink and white pyjamas, and apologised for his costume, and I went and walked in the moonlit corridor with the matron.
"It will be a triumph if we save him," she said—"but it will be your triumph."
I looked at her, startled and perplexed.
"Then you think?" I said.
"Six hours ago the chances were a hundred to one against; they aren't now."
"Doesn't anything ever hurt you?" I said suddenly. "Don't you ever feel all twisted up with the beauty or the honour of things? Don't you find things cruelly lovely or hideously bad? Don't people and their ways make you writhe?"
"I haven't time," she answered tranquilly. "I'm always doing things or else I'm sleeping hard."
The house surgeon came out.