Trevelyan waved Clarke aside.
"I don't want it," he whispered hoarsely. "I couldn't keep it down anyway, and—I—don't—want it!"
And when he was not to be persuaded Mackenzie let him back slowly on the pillow.
All night the nausea lasted, but in the early morning there came cessation for a time, and Mackenzie left Clarke with him, and went to snatch a bit of sleep.
Clarke watched by him in silence—dumb with the terribleness of it all; dumb with his own powerlessness to help—and Trevelyan was grateful for the cessation and the silence.
When the cessation came his thoughts went out to Cary, and they drew the memory of her face to him. It was in truth a dream of heaven—and real, untouched by the thralldom of the morphia.
He was growing weaker—he could feel the ebbing of his strength—and he did not care. In the morning he had fought against it, as he had fought everything all his life—passionately, but now with the cessation and the coming of the dream face, he did not care.
He clung to the vision of the dream though, fiercely, as though fearing it would escape him and be lost forever. He had loved her, and he loved her still!
His love for her had been as a mountain that has been stripped in a storm of its fairest foliage; that has been wrecked by a great fire which has swept it of all its rarest beauty, leaving only the bareness of the boulders, but withstanding the wreck of the storm and the fire. So his love had stood and endured as a sample of the Eternal Handiwork—a basis of his life, as is love the basis of the life of the Everlasting.
He was conscious of the clasp of Clarke's fingers on his wrist, and the sudden appearance of a frightened orderly with the intelligence that Burns, in the next ward, was worse, and would he come at once; and he was dimly conscious of Clarke's bending over him and of his telling him to go to Burns, but he still clung to the vision of the dream face. Desperately he clung to it, even when the blessed cessation suddenly ceased, and it seemed as though he was being engulfed in a great abyss of unspeakable agony, and he kept his thoughts upon it as a crusader would have kept his dying thoughts upon the unattainable quest.