a straining of all her faculties. The blood seemed to drain away
from her body, leaving her ready to sink, and only the watchful and
threatening eye of a man nurse sustained her. He was sitting up in bed,
and she would never have recognized in him anything of Gerald except
for the shining Scandinavian quality of his hair. His eyes were not
bandaged, but their sockets were dry and bare like the beds of old lakes
long since drained. She had only seen the like in eyeless marble busts.
There were unsuspected cheek bones, pitched now very high in his face,
and his neck, rising above the army nightshirt, seemed cruelly long,
possibly from thinness.

"Are you Hester?" whispered the man nurse.

She nodded, her tonsils squeezed together in an absolute knot.

"He called for you all through his delirium," he said, and went out. She
stood at the bedside, trying to keep down the screams from her speech
when it should come. But he was too quick for her.

"Hester," he said, feeling out.

And in their embrace, her agony melted to tears that choked and seared,
beat and scalded her, and all the time it was he who held her with rigid
arm, whispered to her, soothed down the sobs which tore through her like
the rip of silk, seeming to split her being.

"Now--now! Why, Hester! Now--now--now! Sh-h! It will be over in a
minute. You mustn't feel badly. Come now, is this the way to greet a
fellow that's so darn glad to see you that nothing matters? Why I can
see you, Hester. Plain as day in your little crispy waist. Now, now!