A rustle at the door, a strange face staring at her, crisp and cold above white linen.
"Yes?" Charles stepped forward intently.
"The little boy is awake."
"This is Mrs. Hammond, Miss Pert. She may go in?"
She was a culprit, a stranger, trembling, unable to move.
"You'd better take off your hat and coat, Mrs. Hammond. And don't excite him. He's drowsy."
The dim, shaded light; a little still mound under the counterpane; under the smooth white turban of bandages, Spencer's gray eyes, moving softly with her flight from the door to his bed. On her knees beside him, her fingers closing about his hand. Quiet, not to excite him. How limp and small his hand felt!
"Hello, Moth-er!" He sighed, and his eyelids shut down again.
VI
The next two weeks life was a shadow show outside that room where Spencer lay. "He must be kept flat and motionless," the surgeon said, with Dr. Henrietta nodding assent. "Even as he feels stronger." Catherine was concentrated entirely upon that. Everything reduced itself to terms of Spencer. Books that she might read to him, games she might devise, stories she could tell—anything to keep him content until it was safe for him to lift that bandaged, wounded head. Always there was the terror lest some sign of injury might show itself, some quirk in his mind, some change in personality, some flush to indicate fever and infection. "We think he has, miraculously, escaped any bad effects," said Henrietta, "but we can't be absolutely sure for a few days." At night, when he slept, Catherine would leave Charles in the house, and slip out for a quick walk in the cold March darkness. But terrifying images pursued her—sudden blackness shutting down over that shining, golden reality that was Spencer to her—and she would hasten back, unassuaged of her terror until she stood again at the door of his room.