But the far-off sound repeated itself again, again, again and again, monotonously.  Something was calling to Something.  She was so given up to the soft drifting that she had no thoughts to give, and gave none.  In drifting so, one did not think—­thought was left in the far-off place the white sea carried one from.  She sank quietly a little deeper and the water touched her lip.  But Something was calling to Something, something was calling something to come back.  The call was low, low and strange, so regular and so unbroken and insistent, that it arrested, she knew not what.  Did it arrest the floating and the swaying in the enfolding sea?  Was the drifting slower?  She could not rouse herself to think, she wanted to go on.  Did she no longer feel the water lapping against her lip?  Something was calling to Something still.  Once, aeons ago, before the white sea had borne her away, she would have understood.

“Emily, Emily, Emily!”

Yes, once she would have known what the sound meant.  Once it had meant something, a long time ago.  It had even now disturbed the water, and made it cease to lap so near her lip.

* * * * *

It was at this moment that one doctor had raised his eyes to the other, and Lady Walderhurst had stirred.

When Walderhurst left his place beside his wife’s bed, Dr. Warren went with him to his room.  He made him drink brandy and called his man to him.  “You must remember,” he said, “that you are an invalid yourself.”

“I believe,” was the sole answer, given with an abstracted knitting of the brows,—­“I believe that in some mysterious way I have made her hear me.”

Dr. Warren looked grave.  He was a deeply interested man.  He felt that he had been looking on at an almost incomprehensible thing.

“Yes,” was his reply.  “I believe that you have.”

About an hour later Lord Walderhurst made his way downstairs to the room in which Lady Maria Bayne sat.  She still looked a hundred years old, but her maid had redressed her toupee, and given her a handkerchief neither damp nor tinted with rubbed-off rouge.  She looked at her relative a shade more leniently, but still addressed him with something of the manner of a person undeservedly chained to a malefactor.  Her irritation was not modified by the circumstance that it was extremely difficult to be definite in the expression of her condemnation of things which had made her hideously uncomfortable.  Having quite approved of his going to India in the first place, it was not easy to go thoroughly into the subject of the numerous reasons why a man of his years and responsibilities ought to have realised that it was his duty to remain at home and take care of his wife.

“Incredible as it seems,” she snapped, “the doctors think there is a slight change, for the better.”

“Yes,” Walderhurst answered.

He leaned against the mantel and gazed into the fire.