"You mustn't talk like this or you'll break my heart ... but if it eases your mind, I promise you that you shall be taken home."
Then comes Maud—with the ship's doctor—and a hospital nurse, always carried on board for such cases. There is going to be transfusion of blood, and Roger bares his arm....
A pause afterwards and she sleeps, sleeps and wakes, dreams she is with her children and they only call her "Aunt Sibyl," dreams she is once more at Mr. Callaway's, waiting to know if Roger is going to marry her.... Mr. Callaway? Didn't she overhear Roger asking after him from some one who came on board, and didn't they reply "Died of blackwater fever, years ago"? We must all die sooner or later, but oh, why might it not be later in her case? So much to live for!
She is awake again, looking at the brilliant sunlight on the dancing waves and the flying fish that rise in mechanical parabolas of flight that become monotonous. Some form is presently standing between her and this effulgence of sun on water.... It is the ship's captain, a big burly man with a close-clipped, russet beard and kind blue eyes. "Zô," he says, with a mixture of gravity and lightness, "that is bet-ter, moch bet-ter. A ... leetle ... colour ... now ... in ... the ... cheeks...." But his well-meant encouragement trails away into pitiful silence before her ethereal beauty and other-worldliness. Tired middle age has passed from her face with this infusion of Roger's blood. "What a pretty woman she must have been at one time!" he says to himself. His blue eyes fill with tears, and he turns away thanking his German God that his own Frau is not in the least likely to die of anæmia....
The heat and airlessness of the Red Sea bring back a lowering of vitality.... The poor sick brain, insufficiently supplied with red blood, even inspires a peevish tone in the dying woman. "Oh, Roger! I've spoilt your life! You only married me 'to do the right thing'! I ought to have refused.... I broke your career," she wailed.
"Lucy! How can you say such cruel things. Here, drink this. This'll put life and sense into you. Haven't I told you, over and over again—Aren't your children a testimony to our love? But there! It's cruel to argue with an invalid. I shall send Maud to talk sense to you."
"No, stay with me. I want to be with you every minute of the life that remains to me."
They pass through the Suez Canal, but she is insensible mostly now to changes of scenery or to noises, or to anything but the absence of Roger from her side. The fresh breezes of the Mediterranean cause a revival of mentality. "My poor Roger," she says one day when the snow peaks of Crete give hope of an approaching Europe, "how grey you have grown! I never noticed it before. Greyer than you ought to be at your age." And she caresses his hair with an emaciated hand....
"Tell Maud—I never see her now, you are with me always, but tell Maud I love her better than any one in the world, except you. Better than my children. They won't miss me. Africa has always come between us. Still, all the same I send my thanks to Sibyl ... and poor mother.... And tell Mrs. Baines I thought kindly of her ... I was to blame.... But something tells me John has long since understood and forgiven....
"And, Roger? Are you there?" ...