m
to room looking for some one to talk to, but all the rooms were empty.

Terence went upstairs, stood inside the door to take Helen's directions,
looked over at Rachel, but did not attempt to speak to her. She appeared
vaguely conscious of his presence, but it seemed to disturb her, and she
turned, so that she lay with her back to him.

For six days indeed she had been oblivious of the world outside, because
it needed all her attention to follow the hot, red, quick sights which
passed incessantly before her eyes. She knew that it was of enormous
importance that she should attend to these sights and grasp their
meaning, but she was always being just too late to hear or see something
which would explain it all. For this reason, the faces,--Helen's
face, the nurse's, Terence's, the doctor's,--which occasionally forced
themselves very close to her, were worrying because they distracted her
attention and she might miss the clue. However, on the fourth afternoon
she was suddenly unable to keep Helen's face distinct from the sights
themselves; her lips widened as she bent down over the bed, and she
began to gabble unintelligibly like the rest. The sights were all
concerned in some plot, some adventure, some escape. The nature of what
they were doing changed incessantly, although there was always a reason
behind it, which she must endeavour to grasp. Now they were among trees
and savages, now they were on the sea, now they were on the tops of high
towers; now they jumped; now they flew. But just as the crisis was about
to happen, something invariably slipped in her brain, so that the whole
effort had to begin over again. The heat was suffocating. At last the
faces went further away; she fell into a deep pool of sticky water,
which eventually closed over her head. She saw nothing and heard nothing
but a faint booming sound, which was the sound of the sea rolling over
her head. While all her tormentors thought that she was dead, she
was not dead, but curled up at the bottom of the sea. There she lay,
sometimes seeing darkness, sometimes light, while every now and then
some one turned her over at the bottom of the sea.

After St. John had spent some hours in the heat of the sun wrangling
with evasive and very garrulous natives, he extracted the information
that there was a doctor, a French doctor, who was at present away on
a holiday in the hills. It was quite impossible, so they said, to find
him. With his experience of the co