Three days after that Vera was unwontedly restless. There had been a long telegram from her husband in the morning, announcing his return for that night. He had finished all his business with his trainer, engaged the jockeys who were to ride for him next year, and he was coming back to London—he did not say "coming home"—heartily sick of Newmarket, and his Suffolk shooting, and the friends who had been with him.
"Why do we do these things and call them pleasures?" He ended the message with that question, as with a moral.
"Poor Claude!" sighed his wife, as she folded the thin slips of paper and laid them among her books; and then she thought:
"How much happier for him if he had stayed with the Benedictines!"
The days wore on, such slow days. The nurses were more and more attentive, horribly attentive. There were three of them now. Two were always about her, while the third slept. She had left off asking questions. Dr. Tower came every morning, and sat with her quietly for a quarter of an hour, and patted and praised her dog, and told her scraps of the day's news, and was kind; but she heard him without interest, as if without understanding. She had what Susie called her mermaid gaze, as one who saw only things far away, across a vast ocean. She never questioned him now, and made no allusion to the third young woman in uniform, who had come upon the scene so quietly that she looked like a double of one of the others, a trick of the optic nerves rather than another person.
She had the nurses almost always near her; and that other sentinel, the terrier, was there always. There was no "almost" where his affection was concerned. As she grew weaker and moved with feebler steps he moved nearer her. She talked to him sometimes, to the nurses never, though she was gracious to them in her mute fashion, and understood that they liked her and were sorry for her.
One quiet, grey evening, the closing in of a day that had been curiously mild for an English December—a day that brought back the still, sad atmosphere of mid-winter at San Marco—she had an unusual respite from her watchers. It was tea-time, and they were sitting longer than usual over the low fire in the room beyond the library, with the door ajar—no lights switched on, no sound of laughter or loud voices—just two well-behaved young women whispering together in the firelight.
She was alone, moving slowly along the corridor. She had been wandering about for some time, with a restlessness that had increased in a painful degree of late, the dog creeping close against her skirt, until, all in a moment, when she bent down to speak to him, he slunk away from her and crawled under the dark archway that opened into the deeper darkness of the hall, as Vera entered through the open door of the library.