He returned to town, drawn by an obsession of uncertainty.  He found that she had arrived at her rooms in the hospital with the shrivelled old woman and the macaw and a gramophone.

She had signed the register as Marie Dubois.

“It is my real name,” she explained, “but you couldn’t have a good time with a name like that—­voyons!  Only one ’usband and ’eaps of babies.”

She was much nearer the end than he had supposed possible.  The last month had to be paid for.  She lay very still under the gorgeous quilt which she had brought with her, and her hand, which she had stretched out to him in friendly welcome, was like the claw of a bird.  “Everyone ’ere promise not to tell,” she said.  “I’m just Marie Dubois.  Even ze undertaker—­’e must not know.  You put on ze stone:  ’Marie Dubois, ze beloved daughter of Georges and Marianne Dubois, rag-pickers of Paris.’  That will be a last leetle joke, hein?”

“It’s as you wish,” he said coldly.

He forced back the natural questions that came to him.  He had a disordered conviction that he was fighting her for his sanity, for the very ground on which he had built his life, and that he dared not yield by so much as a kindly word.  He did what lay in his power for her with a heart shut and barred.

She brought a little of her world and her whole outlook with her.  On the last day that she was able to be up she dressed herself in a gay mandarin’s coat with a Chinese woman’s trousers, and tried to do her dance for the benefit of a shocked and fascinated matron.  Every morning she wore a new cap to set off the deepening shadow of dissolution.

By the open fire the old woman embroidered ceaselessly.

“She is making—­’ow you call it?—­my shroud.  You see—­with ze blue ribbons.  Blue—­that’s my colour—­my lucky colour.  As soon as I could speak I ask for blue ribbons in my pinafore.”

“I should have thought your mind might be better occupied now,” he retorted with brutal commonplaceness.

She winked at him.

“Oh, but I ’ave ’ad my leetle talk with Monsieur le Cure.  ’E and I are ze best of friends, though I never met ’im before.  ’E understand about ze blue ribbons.  But Monsieur Robert is too clever.”

“It seems so,” he said scornfully.

She questioned him from out of the thickening cloud of morphia.  “You don’t believe in God?” And then as he shook his head she smiled sleepily.  “Well, it is still possible ’e exist, Monsieur—­Monsieur le docteur.”

She lay quiet so that he thought she had fallen asleep, but the next moment her eyes had opened, widening on him with a startling wakefulness.  It was as though her whole personality had leapt to arms, and bursting through the narcotic, stood free with a gay and laughing gesture.  “As to God—­I don’t know about ’im, but I exist—­I go on.  You bet your ’at on that, my friend.  I don’t know where I go—­but I go somewhere.  And I dance.  And if St. Peter sit at ze golden gates, like they say in ze fairybook, I say to ’im:  ’’Ave you ever seen ze Gyp Galop?’ And then I dance for ’im and ze angels play for me”—­she nodded wickedly—­“not ’ymn tunes.”