Thirty hours of that, and then air and a little water. Not enough water. Not all the water in all the cool streams of the earth would have slaked the thirst of his wound.
The boy was impassive. He was living in the past. One day he recited at great length the story of his medals. No one listened.
And all the time his right arm lay or hung, as he was prone or erect, a strange right arm that did not belong to him. It did not even swell. When he touched it the fingers were cold and bluish. It felt like a dead hand.
Then, at the end of it all, was a bed, and a woman's voice, and quiet.
The woman was large and elderly, and her eyes were very kind. She stirred something in the boy that had been dead of pain.
"Edith!" he said.
VI
Mabel had made a hit. Unconscious imitator that she was, she stole Edith's former recklessness, and added to it something of her own dash and verve. Lethway, standing in the wings, knew she was not and never would be Edith. She was not fine enough. Edith at her best had frolicked. Mabel romped, was almost wanton. He cut out the string music at the final rehearsal. It did not fit.
On the opening night the brass notes of the orchestra blared and shrieked. Mabel's bare feet flew, her loose hair, cut to her ears and held only by a band over her forehead, kept time in ecstatic little jerks. When at last she pulled off the fillet and bowed to the applause, her thick short hair fell over her face as she jerked her head forward. They liked that. It savoured of the abandoned. She shook it back, and danced the encore without the fillet. With her scant chiffons whirling about her knees, her loose hair, her girlish body, she was the embodiment of young love, of its passion, its fire.
Edith had been spring, palpitant with gladness.