I sat numbed. I could only repeat stupidly: "But it couldn't be me he
wanted."
I felt as if she were passing to me some imitations of her aloof
snowiness. I, too, felt a little unreal.
"I think you have turned up at the right moment," she said. "Please
come, and don't be surprised if he doesn't know you." She put her hand
on my shoulder. "Don't give up hope," she said; "nothing is
certain--not even in science and surgery."
I think it is in one of Tennyson's things there comes the phrase "into
the jaws of Hell"; it crept into my mind when I saw Walter Markham.
I have never seen anything so terrible or so pathetic. He was
conscious.
"Why, it's Pam!" he said weakly. "Dear little, funny little Pam." Then
earnestly, with a terrible effort to concentrate. "Are you real?" He
took my hand and felt it tremblingly. "You're real," he said.
The matron left us alone.
He was in a tiny room by himself, the blind was up and the big window
looked on to a great hill, like the hunched shoulder of a giant.
"Why did you come?" he said. "Why did you come?"