began.

"Yes, but I want your opinion. You have had experience of many cases
like this?"

"I could not tell you more than Dr. Lesage, Mr. Hewet," she replied
cautiously, as though her words might be used against her. "The case is
serious, but you may feel quite certain that we are doing all we can for
Miss Vinrace." She spoke with some professional self-approbation. But
she realised perhaps that she did not satisfy the young man, who still
blocked her way, for she shifted her feet slightly upon the stair and
looked out of the window where they could see the moon over the sea.

"If you ask me," she began in a curiously stealthy tone, "I never like
May for my patients."

"May?" Terence repeated.

"It may be a fancy, but I don't like to see anybody fall ill in May,"
she continued. "Things seem to go wrong in May. Perhaps it's the moon.
They say the moon affects the brain, don't they, Sir?"

He looked at her but he could not answer her; like all the others, when
one looked at her she seemed to shrivel beneath one's eyes and become
worthless, malicious, and untrustworthy.

She slipped past him and disappeared.

Though he went to his room he was unable even to take his clothes off.
For a long time he paced up and down, and then leaning out of the window
gazed at the earth which lay so dark against the paler blue of the sky.
With a mixture of fear and loathing he looked at the slim black cypress
trees which were still visible in the garden, and heard the unfamiliar
creaking and grating sounds which show that the earth is still hot.
All these sights and sounds appeared sinister and full of hostility and
foreboding; together with the natives and the nurse and the doctor and
the terrible force of the illness itself they seemed to be in conspiracy
against him. They seemed to join together in their effort to extract the
greatest possible amount of suffering from him. He could not get used to
his pain, it was a revelation to him. He had never realised before that
underneath every action, underneath the life of every day, pain lies,
quiescent, but ready to devour; he seemed to be able to see suffering,
as if it were a fire, curling up over the edges of all action, eating
away the lives of men and women. He thought for the first time with
understanding of words which had before seemed to him empty: the
struggle of life; the hardness of life. Now he knew for himself that
life is hard and full of suffering. He looked at the sc