It was a large, gaudily-decorated room, adorned with sporting prints, and lit by a skylight, on to which opaque bodies, evidently fallen from a height, lay in blots, starring the glass.
The billiard-table was littered with doctors' appliances, and at the end near the door the nurse had methodically arranged a line of towels and basins, with a tin can of hot water and a bucket swathed in flannel with ice in it.
The large room, with its glaring upper light, was hot and still, and smelt of stale smoke and chloroform.
At the further end, on an improvised bed of mattresses and striped sofa cushions, a white, rigid figure was lying, the eyes fixed on the skylight.
Monkey Brand knelt down by his wife, and bending over her, kissed, without raising it, one of the pale clenched hands.
"Cuckoo," he said, and until she heard him speak it seemed to Janet that she had never known to what heights tenderness can reach.
His wife turned her eyes slowly upon him, and looked at him. In her eyes, dark with coming death, there was a great yearning towards her husband, and behind the yearning an anguish unspeakable. Janet shrank before it. The fear of death never cut so deep as that.
A cry, uncouth, terrible, as of one pushed past the last outpost of endurance to the extremity of agony, rent the quiet room.
"I cannot bear it," she wailed. And she, who could not raise her hands, to which death had come already, raised them once above her head.