"The gate?"
It seemed to her touch that he drew himself together.
"I said I'd come back—through it——" he whispered. "I shall—come back"—his voice gathered a sudden, terrible, hoarse vibration—"over it—treading it down."
At that he coughed and turned from her, hiding his face. The handkerchief she took from him was soaked in blood. He shuddered and shrank back, overcome by the inveterate, ungovernable horror.
He lay very still, with closed eyes, afraid lest a movement or a word should bring back the thing he loathed. Laura sat up and watched him.
Towards morning the wind dropped a little and there was some rain. The air was warm with the wet south, and the garden sent up a smell, vivid and sweet, the smell of a young spring day. Once the wind was so quiet that she heard the clock strike in the hall of the hospital. She counted seven strokes.
It grew warmer and warmer out there. Owen was very cold.
Laura ran down-stairs to telephone to the Doctor. She was gone about five minutes.
And Prothero lay in his bed under the window with a pool of blood in the hollow of the sheet where it had jetted, and the warm wind blowing over his dead body.