On this day indeed Rachel was conscious of what went on round her.  She had come to the surface of the dark, sticky pool, and a wave seemed to bear her up and down with it; she had ceased to have any will of her own; she lay on the top of the wave conscious of some pain, but chiefly of weakness.  The wave was replaced by the side of a mountain.  Her body became a drift of melting snow, above which her knees rose in huge peaked mountains of bare bone.  It was true that she saw Helen and saw her room, but everything had become very pale and semi-transparent.  Sometimes she could see through the wall in front of her.  Sometimes when Helen went away she seemed to go so far that Rachel’s eyes could hardly follow her.  The room also had an odd power of expanding, and though she pushed her voice out as far as possible until sometimes it became a bird and flew away, she thought it doubtful whether it ever reached the person she was talking to.  There were immense intervals or chasms, for things still had the power to appear visibly before her, between one moment and the next; it sometimes took an hour for Helen to raise her arm, pausing long between each jerky movement, and pour out medicine.  Helen’s form stooping to raise her in bed appeared of gigantic size, and came down upon her like the ceiling falling.  But for long spaces of time she would merely lie conscious of her body floating on the top of the bed and her mind driven to some remote corner of her body, or escaped and gone flitting round the room.  All sights were something of an effort, but the sight of Terence was the greatest effort, because he forced her to join mind to body in the desire to remember something.  She did not wish to remember; it troubled her when people tried to disturb her loneliness; she wished to be alone.  She wished for nothing else in the world.

Although she had cried, Terence observed Helen’s greater hopefulness with something like triumph; in the argument between them she had made the first sign of admitting herself in the wrong.  He waited for Dr. Lesage to come down that afternoon with considerable anxiety, but with the same certainty at the back of his mind that he would in time force them all to admit that they were in the wrong.

As usual, Dr. Lesage was sulky in his manner and very short in his answers.  To Terence’s demand, “She seems to be better?” he replied, looking at him in an odd way, “She has a chance of life.”

The door shut and Terence walked across to the window.  He leant his forehead against the pane.

“Rachel,” he repeated to himself.  “She has a chance of life.  Rachel.”