But if she told him now, the shock of the news might hasten his collapse. Sudden news need not be bad to cause sudden death. And, maybe the story would be too strange for him to grasp. Better be silent. But oh! if he might have shared her happiness!
Drowsiness was upon her before she knew it. Better perhaps sleep a little now, while he was sleeping. She looked in at him, and spoke to the nurse. He lay there like a lifeless waxwork—blown through, like an apparatus out of order, to simulate breath,
and doing it badly. How could he sleep when now and then it jerked him so? He could, and she left him and lay down, and went suddenly to sleep. After a time that was a journey through a desert, without landmarks, she was as suddenly waked.
"What?... I thought you spoke...." And so some one had spoken, but not to her. She started up, and went to where the nurse was conversing through the open window with an inarticulate person in the street below, behind the thick window-curtain she had kept overlapped, to check the freezing air.
"What is it?"
"It's a boy. I can't make out what he says."
"Let me come!" But Rosalind gets no nearer his meaning. She ends up with, "I'll come down," and goes. The nurse closes the window and goes back to the bedroom.
The street door opens easily, the Chubb lock being the only fastening. The moment Rosalind sees the boy near she recognises him. There is no doubt about the presumptuous expression, or the cause of it. Also the ostentatious absence of the front tooth, clearly accounting for inaudibility at a distance.
"What do you want?" asks Rosalind.
"Nothin' at all for myself. I come gratis, I did. There's a many wouldn't." He is not too audible, even now; but he would be better if he did not suck the cross-rail of the area paling.