Impossible, incredible! It could not, it must not be true!
But what good would a wire be to a man lying perhaps unconscious, at any rate alone?
She stood up pushing her hair back from her forehead. A great wave of pity for him, but more for herself, overcame her; she stared out of the room scarcely seeing what was before her.
Just on the opposite side of the room a long pier glass filled up the space between the two tall windows. It was growing dusk, and the mirror showed dark and empty looking against the light. No, not quite empty, there was a figure in it going away from her into the darkness. It was the figure of a man making haste. It hurried on, its back towards her, down an interminable pathway that was lost in the shadows. It was going, oh, so fast! And she recognized it. It was Peter Ramsay as she had last seen him hurrying away to catch his train. It grew smaller and smaller, it overtook the shadows, they gathered it in.
"No! no!" she cried aloud. "Don't go--don t go!"
Was there a pause? She could not tell. The vision vanished, and she was left to the knowledge that she had once more almost over-stepped the bounds of the unseen, and to a dim sense of something unsuspected in herself.
One thing was certain. He must not go, thinking she cared not at all. How many hours was it to Vienna? That mattered very little if she started as quickly as she could. She must get there sooner or later.
Half an hour afterwards she was at the station, and by midnight she was standing looking out at the stars from the deck of a Channel steamer with the lights of Calais ahead of her. She did not regret her impulse, all she thought of was that somehow that figure she had seen losing itself in the shadows must be stopped, must be brought back to the light.
It was a wearisome journey. She had left without due preparation, she was all unused to foreign travelling, and she did not care to forage for food for fear she might be left behind.
So it was rather a dejected Helen Tressilian who got out in the struggling daylight of a November day at the Haupt Bahnhof, and, after a while, found herself driving, she literally knew not whither, through wide streets and narrow streets to the public hospital. It was there, she knew, that Peter Ramsay was working, so there she hoped to have news of him at once. But she had reckoned without the formalism of German institutions. At first she could hardly elicit the fact that there was such a person as a Scotch physician by name Ramsay in Vienna, for she had called him English, and that error, a grave one to the foreigner, had seemed to discredit her altogether.