When he had gone, she sat down again, and drew out her beads
furtively upon her lap.

It was a horrible position for her. She, a Catholic, knew now
pretty well the history of this man--that he himself was a priest
who had lost the faith, who had associated himself with an
historian who was writing a history of the Popes from what he
called an impartial standpoint, who had, as the doctor said,
distinctly and resentfully refused the suggestion that another
priest should be sent to help him to make his peace before he died.
And, for her, as a convinced Catholic, the position had a terror
that is simply inconceivable to those of a less positive faith.

She could do nothing more. . . . She said her beads.

* * * * *

There was a curious mixture of silence and sound here on this
Easter Sunday in this bare, airy little ward, with the door
closed, and the windows open only at the top. The room had a
remote kind of atmosphere about it, obtained perhaps partly by
the solidity of the walls, partly by the fact that it looked out
on to a comparatively unfrequented lane, partly by the
suggestiveness of a professional sick-room. The world was all
about it; yet it seemed rather to this nurse, sitting alone at
her prayers and duties, as if she had a window into the common
world of life rather than that she actually was a part of it.
Even the sounds that entered here had this remote tone about
them; the footsteps and talking of strayed holiday-makers,
occasional fragmentary peals of bells, the striking of the clock
in the high Victoria Tower--all these noises came into the room
delicately and suggestively rather than as interruptions, yet
distinct and noticeable because of the absence of the usual rush
of traffic across the great square outside.

The nurse dozed a little over her beads. (She had been on duty
since the evening before, and would not be relieved for another
hour yet.) And it seemed to her, as so often in that half-sleep,
half-wakefulness, when the drowsy brain knows all necessary
things and awakes alert again in an instant at any unusual
movement or sound, as if these sounds began to take on them tones
of other causes than those of themselves.

It seemed, for example, as if the steady murmur were the shouting
of phantom crowds at an immeasurable distance, punctuated now
again by the noise of distant guns, as, somewhere round a corner
a vehicle passed over a crossing of cobble-stones; as if the
bells