, and leave it.

For Gerry, when Rosalind left him, was rash in assuming he could let
her do so safely. His well-meant pretext of sleep was not destined to
grow into a reality. He had really believed that it would, so soothing
was the touch of her hand in his own. The moment he was alone his mind
leapt, willy-nilly, to the analysis of one point or other in the past
that had just come back to him. He tried to silence thought, and to
sleep, knowing that his best hope was in rest; but each new effort
only ended in his slipping back to what he had just dismissed. And
that terrible last interview with Rosey at Umballa, when he parted
from her, as he thought, never to see her again, was the Rome to which
all the roads of recollection led. Each involuntary visit there had
its _rencherissement_ on the previous one, and in the end the image of
that hour became a brain-oppression, and wrote the word "fever" large
on the tablets of his apprehension.

He knew now it was not to be sleep; he knew it as he sat up in bed
feeling his pulse, and stimulating it with his anxiety that it should
go slow. Was there nothing he could take that would make him sleep?
Certainly he knew of nothing, anywhere, except it was to be found by
waking Rosalind, probably sound asleep by now. Out of the question!
Oh, why, why, with all the warning he had had, had he neglected to
provide himself with a mysterious thing known to him all his life as
a soothing-draught? It would have been so useful now, and Conrad would
have defined it down to the prosaic requirements of pharmacy. But it
was too late!

So long as her hand was in his, so long as her lips were near his own,
what did it matter what he recollected? The living present cancelled
the dead past. But to be there alone in the dark, with the image
of that Rosalind of former years clinging to him, and crying for
forgiveness because his mind, warped against her by a false conception
of the truth, could not forgive; to be defenceless against her last
words, coming through the long interval to him again just as he heard
them, twenty years ago, bringing back the other noises of the Indian
night--the lowing of the bullocks in the compound, the striking of
the hour on the Kutcherry gongs, the grinding of the Persian wheels
unceasingly drawing water for the irrigation of the fields--to be
exposed to this solitude and ever-growing imagination was to become
the soil for a self-sown crop of terrors--fear of fever,