ed to be eternally fixed above
her. She shut her eyes. When she opened them again several more hours
had passed, but the night still lasted interminably. The woman was still
playing cards, only she sat now in a tunnel under a river, and the light
stood in a little archway in the wall above her. She cried "Terence!"
and the peaked shadow again moved across the ceiling, as the woman with
an enormous slow movement rose, and they both stood still above her.

"It's just as difficult to keep you in bed as it was to keep Mr. Forrest
in bed," the woman said, "and he was such a tall gentleman."

In order to get rid of this terrible stationary sight Rachel again shut
her eyes, and found herself walking through a tunnel under the Thames,
where there were little deformed women sitting in archways playing
cards, while the bricks of which the wall was made oozed with damp,
which collected into drops and slid down the wall. But the little old
women became Helen and Nurse McInnis after a time, standing in the
window together whispering, whispering incessantly.

Meanwhile outside her room the sounds, the movements, and the lives of
the other people in the house went on in the ordinary light of the sun,
throughout the usual succession of hours. When, on the first day of her
illness, it became clear that she would not be absolutely well, for her
temperature was very high, until Friday, that day being Tuesday, Terence
was filled with resentment, not against her, but against the force
outside them which was separating them. He counted up the number of days
that would almost certainly be spoilt for them. He realised, with an odd
mixture of pleasure and annoyance, that, for the first time in his life,
he was so dependent upon another person that his happiness was in her
keeping. The days were completely wasted upon trifling, immaterial
things, for after three weeks of such intimacy and intensity all the
usual occupations were unbearably flat and beside the point. The least
intolerable occupation was to talk to St. John about Rachel's illness,
and to discuss every symptom and its meaning, and, when this subject was
exhausted, to discuss illness of all kinds, and what caused them, and
what cured them.

Twice every day he went in to sit with Rachel, and twice every day the
same thing happened. On going into her room, which was not very dark,
where the music was lying about as usual, and her books and letters, his
spirits rose instantly. When