"LESS THAN THE DUST"
The heat of August shimmered over the land, and still, to every inquiry at the door or telephone, the quiet young woman in blue and white said: "No change." Allison was listless and apathetic, yet comparatively free from pain.
Life, for him, had ebbed back to the point where the tide must either cease or turn. He knew neither hunger nor thirst nor weariness; only the great pause of soul and body, the sense of the ultimate goal.
One by one, he meditated upon the things he used to care for. Isabel came first, but her youth and beauty had ceased to trouble or to beckon. His father had gone on ahead. The delusion still persisted, but he spoke of it no more. Even the violin did not matter now. He remembered the endless hours he had spent at work, almost every day of his life for years, and to what end? In an instant, it had been rendered empty, purposeless, and vain—like life itself.
Occasionally a new man came to look at his hand; not from the city now, but from towns farther inland. The examinations were painful, of course, but he made no objections. After the man had gone, he could count the slow, distinct pulsations that marked the ebbing of the pain, but never troubled himself to ask either the doctor or the nurse what the new man had said about it. He no longer cared.
Aunt Francesca had not come—nor Rose. Perhaps they were dead, also. He asked the nurse one sultry afternoon if they were dead.
"No," she assured him; "nobody is dead."
He wondered, fretfully, why she should take the trouble to lie to him so persistently upon this one point. Then a cunning scheme came into his mind. It presented itself mechanically to him as a trap for the nurse. If they were dead, she could not produce them instantly alive, as a conjurer takes animals from an apparently empty box. If he demanded that she should bring them to him, or even one, it would prove his point and let her see that he knew how she was trying to deceive him.
"Have they gone away?" he inquired.
"No, they're still there."