“Is it the end?” Zoë whispered to one of the nurses in an awestruck voice.
“I’m afraid so,” the woman answered, and placed a chair for her beside the bed.
She sank into it, and leaning forward looked fearfully at the quiet figure, the closed eyes, the pinched grey features. Almost she could fancy that he was dead already. She took one of the listless hands. It lay in hers limply, without response, without sense of feeling. She drew it to her and kissed it. Then she laid her head upon the pillow beside his and drew his face to hers, and held it pressed close against her cheek.
And so the doctor found her when he entered with her jealous arms clasping the inert figure, satisfying their long starvation of denial by contact, and with the glowing beauty of her warm rounded cheek resting against the shrunken colourless face on the pillow that had given no sign of life or movement since her entry. The doctor leant over the bed. He placed a quiet hand upon her shoulder to prevent her moving, and bending, low looked intently into the still face.
“He is asleep,” he said, and straightened himself and moved noiselessly away.
And Zoë Lawless remained where she was, undisturbed by everything and everyone about her, as oblivious as the sick man of external things. She was beyond thinking of the issues. She had ceased to wonder whether this crisis in his illness which meant the turning-point one way or the other would decide in his favour or not. He was hers. That was all that mattered then. Whether it were life or death that claimed him, it had given him to her. In the detachment of the moment that was the only thing that held any reality for her. She had got outside of life for a time. The things that went on in the world did not concern her; she had drawn apart from it all to a remote distance and was happy in her isolation with the body of her love.
All that day Lawless lay in the same comatose condition. It was impossible to say when he slept and when he was awake. He never appeared entirely conscious. At intervals the nurse gave him nourishment or a dose of medicine. She did not disturb Mrs Lawless, save at meal times to insist on her leaving the room in quest of food. Zoë went reluctantly, and wandered back after a brief absence, and took her place as before. Whether she had eaten in the interval was problematical; but the change and movement were a relief.
She stayed with him until nine o’clock that night. When she left he was sleeping soundly and comfortably; and, white and weary but extraordinarily happy, she went to bed and fell promptly into a deep and dreamless sleep.
And the next day the bedroom door was closed against her again. He was better. He was fully conscious, but he made no demand to see her; and in compliance with the doctor’s wishes she remained outside.
“Yesterday was the crisis,” he said to her. “He’s turned the corner. He isn’t out of the wood, but if there are no excitements he ought to pull through.”