But
for a few minutes, before the doctors arrived, he was alone with
her behind the screen. It was like being alone with his dead.
Bent over her, his face pressed to one of her quiet hands, he
whispered to her all the little tendernesses, the aching want of
her, that so long he had buried in his heart. Things he could not
have told her, waking, he told her then. It seemed, too, that she
must rouse to them, that she must feel him there beside her,
calling her back. But she did not move.
It was then, for the first time, that he wondered what he would do
if she should die.
The doctors, coming behind the screen, found him sitting erect and
still, staring ahead of him, with a strange expression on his face.
He had just decided that he could not, under any circumstances,
live if she died.
It was rather a good thing for Clayton's sanity that they gave him
hope. He was completely unnerved, tired and desperate. Indeed,
when they came in he had been picturing Audrey and himself,
wandering hand in hand, very quietly and contentedly, in some
strange world which was his rather hazy idea of the Beyond.
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