At last he spoke: “Is it night, Eva?”
She told him “Yes”; she didn’t want him to look at her like that, and so with her hand she smoothed back the lank hair from his brow.
“I think I have been dreaming,” he said. And then, again: “What day is it?”
She had to consider before she answered him. “It’s . . . it’s Saturday morning.”
“Saturday. . . . Saturday. . . . To-morrow will be Sunday. I don’t know. . . . I seem to have missed two days. I don’t understand . . .”
“Don’t try to understand now,” she begged him.
He was wonderfully mild. “All right,” he said, “I won’t try to understand. It does hurt rather. I’m awfully thirsty too. And I want to tell you about my dream. A peculiar dream.”
She gave him a cupful of milk, which he drank eagerly.
“Saturday morning,” he said. “And Sunday to-morrow. That means that I shall have to be better by then. But to have dropped two days, two whole days. Where have I been during those two days?”
Literally, as one answers a child without thinking, she told him that he had been in that room and on that bed; and, curiously enough, her answer seemed to satisfy him. Then suddenly he started to laugh in a feeble, helpless way.