him, this might not have happened.

"To think that only a wall separated us!" she kept saying to
herself. "And I sleeping and dreaming of him, and he dying only
a few yards away."

Death was no disaster for Tom, so the doctor had said. What
worthless wisdom! And perhaps not even wisdom. Who knows what a
disaster death may be? And who would ever know what he had felt
at the end, or what his mind had suffered if time had been given
him to understand that he was going to die? She worked herself
into agony, lost self-control at last and wept, with Jane Bond's
arms round her.

"And I was so troubled, because I thought he had been called back
to his ship!" she said.

"He's called to a better place than a ship, dear love," sobbed Jane.

After they left her, Sir Walter and Dr. Mannering had entered the
Grey Room for a moment and, standing there, spoke together.

"I have a strange consciousness that I am living over the past
again," declared the physician. "Things were just so when that
poor woman, Nurse Forrester--you remember."

"Yes. I felt the same when Caunter was breaking open the door. I
faced the worst from the beginning, for the moment I heard what he
had done, I somehow knew that my unfortunate son-in-law was dead.
I directly negatived his suggestion last night, and never dreamed