She obeyed the summons. What was the matter?
"Everything seems to have got mixed up, and my knee's hurting like fury."
She attended to his crumpled bedclothes, cracked a little joke which made him laugh. Then the two other men claimed her notice. She carried on her work outwardly calm, smiling, self-reliant, the perfectly trained woman of the war. But her heart was beating in an unaccustomed way.
Her ministrations over, she left the ward for duty elsewhere.
At tea-time she returned, and aided the blindfolded man to get through the meal. The dread of the morning had given place to mingled mind-racking wonder and timidity. He had gone off, on the hot speed of their last quarrel, out of her life. Save for a short, anguished period, during which she had lost self-control, she had never reproached him. She had asserted her freedom. He had asserted his. Nay; more—he had held the door open for a way out from an impossible situation, and she had slammed the door in his face. Self-centered in those days, centered since the beginning of the war in human suffering, she had thought little of the man's feelings. He had gone away and forgotten, or done his best to forget, an ugly memory. Her last night's review of ghosts had proved the non-existence of any illusions among them. But now, now that the chances of war had brought them again together, the sound of her voice had conjured up in him, too, the ghosts of the past. She had been responsible for his going-about with a temperature of a hundred and three, and for his not caring what happened to him. He had lifted the corner of a curtain, revealing the possibility of undreamed-of happenings.
"You were quoting Tennyson just now," she remarked.
"Was I?"
"Your cap-and-bells speech."
"Oh, yes. What about it?"
"I was only wondering."