Hours and hours would pass thus, without getting any further through the morning, or again a few minutes would lead from broad daylight to the depths of the night.  One evening when the room appeared very dim, either because it was evening or because the blinds were drawn, Helen said to her, “Some one is going to sit here to-night.  You won’t mind?”

Opening her eyes, Rachel saw not only Helen but a nurse in spectacles, whose face vaguely recalled something that she had once seen.  She had seen her in the chapel.  “Nurse McInnis,” said Helen, and the nurse smiled steadily as they all did, and said that she did not find many people who were frightened of her.  After waiting for a moment they both disappeared, and having turned on her pillow Rachel woke to find herself in the midst of one of those interminable nights which do not end at twelve, but go on into the double figures—­thirteen, fourteen, and so on until they reach the twenties, and then the thirties, and then the forties.  She realised that there is nothing to prevent nights from doing this if they choose.  At a great distance an elderly woman sat with her head bent down; Rachel raised herself slightly and saw with dismay that she was playing cards by the light of a candle which stood in the hollow of a newspaper.  The sight had something inexplicably sinister about it, and she was terrified and cried out, upon which the woman laid down her cards and came across the room, shading the candle with her hands.  Coming nearer and nearer across the great space of the room, she stood at last above Rachel’s head and said, “Not asleep?  Let me make you comfortable.”

She put down the candle and began to arrange the bedclothes.  It struck Rachel that a woman who sat playing cards in a cavern all night long would have very cold hands, and she shrunk from the touch of them.

“Why, there’s a toe all the way down there!” the woman said, proceeding to tuck in the bedclothes.  Rachel did not realise that the toe was hers.

“You must try and lie still,” she proceeded, “because if you lie still you will be less hot, and if you toss about you will make yourself more hot, and we don’t want you to be any hotter than you are.”  She stood looking down upon Rachel for an enormous length of time.

“And the quieter you lie the sooner you will be well,” she repeated.

Rachel kept her eyes fixed upon the peaked shadow on the ceiling, and all her energy was concentrated upon the desire that this shadow should move.  But the shadow and the woman seemed to be eternally fixed above her.  She shut her eyes.  When she opened them again several more hours had passed, but the night still lasted interminably.  The woman was still playing cards, only she sat now in a tunnel under a river, and the light stood in a little archway in the wall above her.  She cried “Terence!” and the peaked shadow again moved across the ceiling, as the woman with an enormous slow movement rose, and they both stood still above her.