"Oh yes—she's coming." Judith had hard work to refrain from breaking out "Have you forgotten Trout Bend and the convict's bridge; the little Tophet garden and the letter, and all my shawl in a blaze? Have you no memory of the play you wrote for me to play in; of your fatuous declaration of a passion a man of your sobriety should have been ashamed of; above all of our meeting of two days since, our reckless race along the sunlit road, and its tragic ending?" But she knew all this, that her tongue was itching to remind him of, was good for oblivion only; knew it by a thousand tokens, most of all by the revelation chance had given of the background of his mind. Even the knowledge that all fruition of their crazy scheme was perforce at an end was as nothing compared to that. Therefore she felt it safest to say curtly that Marianne was coming, and to add that the nurse would be back in a moment to remove the bandage.
Challis closed his eyes again with a tired sigh. "I can't trust myself to talk," said he. "All sorts of things keep coming into my head, and convincing me I must be out of my senses. But I'm clear about one thing. Someone is being very kind to me. I have a general impression that I don't deserve it, and I want to thank ... want to thank...." He seemed to give it up as a bad job, and to relapse into half-stupor.
Judith was fast coming to the conclusion that the sooner she and Challis saw the last of one another the better for both. But "to part at last without a kiss!" The words of Morris's poem came into her mind. Well—suppose in this case we were to say, "without a handshake"? That would be quite enough. At least, that knight beside the Haystack in the Floods would have known whom the kissed lips belonged to. Challis's disordered head had constituted him a stranger to her. All the same, to have the tale of their love end on a blank and vanish, and none write a word of epilogue—not so much as a bare finis!—grated on her sense of the fitness of things. She would just try to print the word herself, without provoking an appendix. If he was insensible again and did not hear her, what did it matter?
"The nurse will come directly," she repeated. "I have to go now. Good-bye!"
He opened his eyes again, rousing himself. "Oh—good-bye—good-bye!" said he. "I am sorry you have to go." He took her hand, shaking it frankly and warmly. She was afraid the touch of her own hand might bring back the past—the useless past—and almost stinted to return its pressure.
She turned in the doorway, and said, referring to footsteps approaching the room without, "Perhaps you will know this gentleman who is coming now, and he will tell you who I am." A bitterness in her heart made the last words come, and then she said to the nurse and Athelstan Taylor, who was with her, "He's been talking again, quite like himself, only he doesn't know me from Adam. But I fancy he'll soon be all right."
"That's good hearing," said the Rector cheerfully. "You'll find the Duchess downstairs. She's asking for you, to take you to Thanes."
"Oh, is she? I think I shall put my things on at once, and go with her." She went to her room and rang for her maid, whom she sent with a message to the Duchess. She would be ready in five minutes, she said, and meant to stop the night.
When the little handmaiden had finished her ministrations, and her mistress and the Duchess had driven away, she was found in tears by a fellow-servant, and explained them by saying Miss Judith was angry with her. Because she had never once called her Cintilla, but only Clemency, which was merely her proper name.
"My dear sir," said Challis to the Rector, standing by his bed, "you say, 'Don't I know you?' And you say it so confidently that it convinces me I ought to know you. But I can't say I do. Honour bright!"