“Certainly,” she said in brisk, business-like tones. “Just wait a minute and I’ll call the nurse.”
She crossed the large studio with ponderous agility and tapped upon a glass paneled door. It opened just enough to permit the emerging of a white-capped head. Whispered words were exchanged, and Anne was beckoned forward.
With a glance of commiseration for Claire, who had sunk into a chair next the wall and was leaning forward like a broken thing, Anne passed by her swiftly.
The next moment she knelt at Alexis’s bedside.
Emaciated, a spot of crimson beneath each glowing eye, his labored breathing filled the room with tragic effort. Suppressing a cry of pity, Anne took one of the burning hands and held it between her cool palms, as if to quench the inward fire. But the glittering eyes, as they fell upon her, held no gleam of recognition. The monotonous agony of ingoing and outgoing breath continued as before.
“Will he die?” she whispered to the nurse who had closed the door upon Mme. Petrovskey, and tiptoed back again to the bedside.
The woman looked non-committal. In the shaded glare from the night light, green rings about her eyes cut into her face like spherical eclipses.
“If the fever goes down he ought to live,” she said. “The congestion in the lung is bad, but so far has not spread to the other. If the cause of cerebral excitement can be removed”—her eyes rested upon Anne curiously—“he will probably get well.”
“He doesn’t seem to be particularly excited? I understood that——” Anne broke off in some confusion, and then continued sturdily, “that he had been asking for me?”
The nurse nodded.