She was reminded that he had told her to give herself another injection of phage.
“Hang it, I forgot. Well, I must be sure to do that to-morrow.”
“Do that t’morrow—do that t’morrow,” buzzed in her brain, an irritating inescapable refrain, while she was suspended over sleep, conscious of how much she wanted to creep into his arms.
Next morning (and she did not remember to give herself another injection) the servants seemed twitchy, and her effort to comfort them brought out the news that Oliver Marchand, the doctor on whom they depended, was dead.
In the afternoon the butler heard that his sister had been taken off to the isolation ward, and he went down to Blackwater to make arrangements for his nieces. He did not return; no one ever learned what had become of him.
Toward dusk, when Leora felt as though a skirmish line were closing in on her, she fled into Martin’s laboratory. It seemed filled with his jerky brimming presence. She kept away from the flasks of plague germs, but she picked up, because it was his, a half-smoked cigarette and lighted it.
Now there was a slight crack in her lips; and that morning, fumbling at dusting—here in the laboratory meant as a fortress against disease—a maid had knocked over a test-tube, which had trickled. The cigarette seemed dry enough, but in it there were enough plague germs to kill a regiment.
Two nights after, when she was so desperately lonely that she thought of walking to Blackwater, finding a motor, and fleeing to Martin, she woke with a fever, a headache, her limbs chilly. When the maids discovered her in the morning, they fled from the house. While lassitude flowed round her, she was left alone in the isolated house, with no telephone.
All day, all night, as her throat crackled with thirst, she lay longing for some one to help her. Once she crawled to the kitchen for water. The floor of the bedroom was an endless heaving sea, the hall a writhing dimness, and by the kitchen door she dropped and lay for an hour, whimpering.
“Got to—got to—can’t remember what it was,” her voice kept appealing to her cloudy brain.