"'Are you there?' he asked, and she answered:
"'I am here, beloved of my heart,' and he lifted his face towards hers which was slightly cold with dew and the night.
"'It is so well with me,' she whispered: but Mr Sorrell was full of fears."
The cleverness of that touch of the chloroform at that particular stage in the story is amazing. I know nothing quite like that chapter in all fiction.
We are then swept back at once to a pageant of colour where the ladies hold a tourney and Mr Sorrell is knighted by Sir Ygorac of Fordingbridge as Sir Guilhelm de Winterburne de St Martin. The Lady Dionissia fights in the lists against the Lady Blanche, first with spears and then with axes, which fight the Lady Dionissia, of course, wins. She then goes with Mr Sorrell to his new castle and her husband returns and kills the new knight of Winterburne ... and Mr Sorrell wakes up, wakes up to intolerable agony in a hospital.
Two months afterwards he goes back to Salisbury to retrace the steps and rides all over the country-side in search of——"A girl shot past them going very fast. She had a face of conspicuous fairness, a dress of light blue print, a white linen coif that hid all her hair.
"'My God!' Sir William said suddenly. [He is now Sir William Sorrell.] 'Did you see? Who was that? In God's name who was that?'
"'Why,' young Lee-Egerton said, 'that was Nurse Morane. The one who nursed you till the first time they trepanned you. She broke down the day before they trepanned you the second time. My mother says she couldn't stand the excitement, because she was in love with you."
Sir William galloped off down the road and up the hill towards a cluster of old and falling buildings.... "It was so old that you could hardly recognise it for a house, and so forlorn that you shivered when you passed it ... the living-room into which Sir William went was large, long and low. It was quite empty ... a door ... opened gently. There appeared a girl in a blue dress.
"'You are Sir William Sorrell,' she said. 'I am Dionissia Morane.... I was born in this room....'