With one short sigh, Rollinson lifted the portrait of his rival and set it down, the face against the wall.
AT THE END OF THE WORLD
“And so, as kinsmen met a night,
We talked between the rooms,
Until the moss had reached our lips,
And covered up our names.”
She was sitting quietly in the sleeper, writing a letter to a friend. She had got as far as “I feel it my duty to tell you,” when the pencil flew out of her fingers. She had an instantaneous impression, grotesque in its horror, that all the natural laws were being unsettled with a terrible, grinding noise; for the pencil was falling toward the ceiling instead of the floor, and the man in front of her was following it, and even she herself. Then something struck her head and she lost consciousness.
When she came to herself she was lying on a cot in one corner of a large, unfamiliar room. As her gaze wandered slowly from object to object on the whitewashed walls, she concluded, from the combination of railway maps, time-cards, dusty windows filled with geraniums in pots, and a large, rusty Bible chained to a wall-pocket, that she was in a country railroad station; but when she turned her head she saw that it also resembled a hospital. She felt bruised and sore, but was not in much pain, and only an indefinable sensation of great weakness warned her not to move.
Presently some one noticed that her eyes were open and, drawing near, asked her some questions. She answered them with ease, and then in her turn asked a few. The man, obviously a physician, answered briefly but definitely. Then he drew a note-book from his pocket, took down some addresses that she gave him, and moved away softly in the direction of the telegraph window. She lay, looking after him incredulously. So this was death! She had at farthest two more hours on earth. It was part of her creed that one may permit one’s self to be surprised but never startled. She was not startled now, but, decidedly, she was sorry. Her best work was yet undone, and she had not meant to leave earth while there still remained so much to do.
The sounds and sights of the hastily improvised hospital were unpleasant to her, and she turned her head away from them. There was one cot between her and the corner. She recognized the profile of that bandaged head as belonging to the man who had sat across the aisle in the sleeper. She had jotted down a description of him in her note-book, thinking she might use it some day. It ran: