‘I never did before,’ she laughed. ‘Yes, it was like that—’
It was as if the windows were all thrust open into a wide silent summer, like the stillness of mountains, where there is not even the rustle of a wing. A clean perfume came in, and there was a clear seeing in Elbert’s brain, as if an arc-light were burning, where only candles had shone before.
‘It was so dreadful, because I had promised,’ she said.
‘How was that?’
‘You had asked me to help you, and I had promised. Then I found I could not even lift my hand. It was then I kept saying, “I have to help him, please. I have to help him, please—”’
‘I see,’ said Elbert.
‘And then it was as if I could see the car below—see right through into it, and I could see you and me, sort of little and broken inside, and I could feel our pain, but we were really together outside and above, and we knew it would be all right—’
Now he could actually help carry out her picture. ‘I remember in the hospital,’ he said quickly, ‘when they gave me an anæsthetic, I could look down at myself like that. I wouldn’t tell anybody—if I were you.’
‘Oh, I wouldn’t for worlds! They’d call it being out of the head!’
So she had kept all this, until he came. Just now he turned to her, and there wasn’t a sound from the halls. The light was easy and flowing in the room. Everything was like a slow movement. His right foot raised to take the step toward her, but suddenly he knew if he took the step, it would be next to impossible to remember clearly that he must find Bart Leadley; quite plain, it was, that if he took this step toward her, he wouldn’t be able to go down into Mexico alone and keep his mind to the allegiance he had entered with Bart’s father. His foot settled back to the floor.