One day she persuaded him to let her stay up longer than usual. She liked to see him writing, she said; and what harm was there, if she sat as still as a mouse and didn’t talk? He could tell the doctor that she didn’t talk. … Vance, deep in his work, absently acquiesced. He liked to have her near him while he wrote—he felt as if nothing could go really wrong while he was close to her, and he knew that she felt so too. He no longer believed she was going to die, and he had an idea that she did not believe so either; but neither of them dared to say a word to the other. It was as if they must just sit and hold their breath while the footsteps of the enemy hesitated outside on the threshold.
Vance wrote on as long as the daylight lasted; then he got up to fetch the lamp. The fire had gone out, and he noticed with dismay how cold the room had grown. He called to the woman in the kitchen to bring in some coal. He stood the lamp on the desk, and as the unshaded light fell on Laura Lou’s face he felt a return of fear. She was sleeping quietly, but her face was so bloodless that there seemed to be nothing alive about her but the hair bubbling up with unnatural brilliance from her drawn forehead. “I wonder if it’s true that the hair dies last?” he thought.
When the fire was made up he said: “We’d better get her back to bed,” and while the woman went in to prepare the bed he stooped over Laura Lou and gathered her up. Her eyes opened and rested on his, but with a look of terror and bewilderment. “Who is it?” she exclaimed, and began to struggle in his arms; and as he lowered her to the bed the hemorrhage came. … He hurried the woman off to telephone for the doctor, adjuring her to come back as quickly as she could; and when she had gone he tried to remember what he had been told to do if “it” happened, and to stumble through the doing as best he could. By and by the bleeding stopped and he sat down by the bed and waited. The night was so still that he could hear every sound a long way off; but no one came, and as he sat there remembered the frightened fugitive look in the woman’s eyes, and said to himself that she probably did not mean to return. … The time dragged on—hours and hours, days and nights, it might have been—and finally he heard the doctor’s motor-horn down the lane. He looked at his watch and saw that it was hardly an hour since the woman had gone for him.
The doctor said there was nothing to do—never had been, anyhow, from the first. In those cases he never bothered people—just let them stay where they wanted to … No, there wouldn’t have been anything to do last winter, even. Of course, if they’d known long ago … but it was the quick kind, that had probably been only a few months developing, and in those cases there wasn’t any earthly good in sending people off. …
He agreed with Vance that the woman probably wouldn’t come back; hemorrhages always scared that kind of people out of their senses; but he promised to try and get a nurse the first thing in the morning. There was a bad epidemic of grippe, and nurses were scarce in the district; but he’d do what he could … and for the time being he thought everything would be comfortable. When he had gone Vance looked at his watch again and saw that it was not yet ten o’clock. He sat down by the bed, where Laura Lou was sleeping with a quiet look on her face.
Before daylight Vance crept out to put coal on the fire and start up the range. He opened the front door and looked out into the thinning darkness. All his actions were mechanical; his mind refused to work. He felt a lethargic heaviness stealing over him, and finding a pot of cold coffee in the kitchen he put it on the range to warm. Then he crept back to Laura Lou, sat down by the bed, and fell asleep … When he woke it was broad daylight, but she was still sleeping. He shook himself, got the hot coffee, and swallowed it at a gulp. Then he began to set about such rudimentary housework as he was capable of, while he waited for Laura Lou to wake.
After a while he heard a motor horn. It was not the doctor’s hoot; but perhaps it might be the nurse? He interrupted the cleaning of the kitchen dishes, and when he got to the front door he saw that a big motor had stopped halfway down the lane, and that a man was advancing on foot under the apple trees. He and Vance stared at each other. It was Bunty Hayes.
“Say—this is country life all right!” Hayes exclaimed, coming forward with outstretched hand. “It takes a sleuth to run you folks down.”
Vance stood motionless on the porch. The shock of Hayes’s sudden appearance acted stupefyingly on his unstrung nerves. For a moment he could not adjust himself to this abrupt intrusion of a world that had passed out of his thoughts. Then anger seized him.
“It was no earthly use running us down,” he said.
“No use?”
“I haven’t got anything for you. I haven’t done a stroke of work, and I’ve spent every cent of the money you gave me.”
Hayes received this with a look of embarrassment, as though the words offended not his pride but a sense of delicacy which Vance had never suspected in him. He stood in the grass below the doorstep and looked up at Vance, and Vance looked down on him
