His shoulder was very comfortable. She closed her blue eyes.
"You will wake me?" she murmured.
"Sure I vill," said Max. "I'll have you clean avake before she's through knockin'."
But he must have forgotten that promise, for when Mrs. Légère at last returned, he was still sitting there among the pillows, Mary's hair fallen over his green coat, her cheeks pinker than ever, and her girlish breast rising and falling rhythmically in sleep.
IV
AWAKENING
Clinging to a gigantic pendulum, Mary was swept through a mighty curve of roaring darkness, up from the black chasm of insensibility, and tossed, swaying over that frightful cliff, to the precipitous crag of consciousness. For what seemed many minutes, she tottered on the verge, dizzy, afraid. Then white knives, swift and sharp, slashed at her eyes and forced up the lids.
Defying closed blinds and drawn chintz curtains, the sunlight of noonday beat upon her face. She pulled something between her cheek and the leaping rays. Her hand trembled.
At first she could neither think nor recollect. The blows of an ax, regular, tremendous, were splitting her head. Her throat was hot and dry and choking. Her stomach crawled and leaped with nausea. From head to foot she was shaking with recurrent nervous chills that wracked a body of which every muscle was strained and sore.
Realization of the present came slowly, but it preceded all memory of the past. She found that the thing with which she had instinctively shaded her eyes was a sheet, and, as she lowered it, she saw, in a glance where the employment of sight was a separate pain, that she was lying among large pillows in a big brass bed, heavily mattressed. Beyond the foot of the bed her survey could not extend, because the foot was high and hung with a pink and green down quilt; but between two windows against the wall to her right, she saw a bureau, bearing a few scant toilet articles, and opposite, on the left, there was a washstand with a basin on the floor before it and, on its top, a pitcher, a soap-tray, a small brown bottle, and a little blue box bursting with white cotton.