'The next time he spoke, it was quite distinctly and of his own accord. The nurse heard him saying softly—it was in the early morning—"I want my wife—send for her." She told him you had been already sent for, and he turned his head round at once and went to sleep.'
Howson could hardly go on, so keenly did he realise the presence of the woman beside him. The soft fluttering breath unmanned him. But by degrees Nelly heard all there was to know; especially the details of the rapid revival of hearing, speech, and memory, which had gone on through the preceding three days.
'And what is such a blessing,' said Howson, with the cheerfulness of the good doctor—'is that he seems to be quite peaceful—quite at rest. He's not unhappy. He's just waiting for you. They'll have given him an injection of strychnine this evening to help him through.'
'How long?' The words were just breathed into the darkness.
'A day or two certainly—perhaps a week,' he said reluctantly. 'It's a question of strength. Sometimes it lasts much longer than we expect.'
He said nothing to her of her sister's visit. Instinctively he suspected some ugly meaning in that story. And Nelly asked no questions.
Suddenly, she was aware of lights in the darkness, and then of a great camp marked out in a pattern of electric lamps, stretching up and away over what seemed a wide and sloping hillside. Nelly put down the window to see.
'Is it here?' 'No. A little further on.'
It seemed to her interminably further. The car rattled over the rough pavement of a town, then through the darkness of woods—threading its way through a confusion of pale roads—until, with a violent bump, it came to a stop.
In the blackness of the November night, the chauffeur, mistaking the entrance to a house, had run up a back lane and into a sand-bank.