His lips moved mechanically as he breathed, and his breath came with a deep grating sound.  His left arm was stretched outside, upon the blanket.  A nurse stood at the head of the bed.  She moved as Anne entered and gave place to her.  Anne put out her hand and touched his arm, caressing it.

The nurse said, “There has been no change.”  She lifted his arm by the wrist and laid it in his wife’s hand that she might see that he was paralysed.

And Anne sat still by the bedside, staring at her husband’s face, and holding his heavy arm in her hand, as if she could thus help him to bear the weight of it.

Hannay gave one look at her as she sat there.  He said something to the nurse and went out of the room.  The woman followed him.

After they went Anne bowed her head and laid it on the pillow beside her husband’s, with her cheek against his cheek.  She stayed so for a moment.  Then she lifted her head and looked about her.  Her eyes took note of trifles.  She saw that the blankets were drawn straight over his body, as if over the body of a dead man.  The pillow-cases and the end of the sheet, which was turned down over the blankets, were clean and creaseless.

He could not move.  He was paralysed.  They had not told her that.

She saw that he wore a clean white nightshirt of coarse cotton.  It must have been lent by one of the people of the hotel.  His illness must have come upon him last night, when he was still up and dressed.  They must have carried him in here, and laid him in the clean bed.  Everything about him was very white and clean.  She was glad.

She sat there till the nurse came back again.  She had to move away from him then.  It hurt her to see the woman bending over his bed, looking at him, to see, her hands touching him.

A bell rang somewhere in the hotel.  Hannay came in and told her that there was luncheon in the sitting-room.  She shook her head.  He put his hand on her shoulder and spoke to her as if she had been a child.  She must eat, he said; she would be no good if she did not eat.  She got up and followed him.  She ate and drank whatever he gave her.  Then she went back to her husband, and watched beside him while the nurse went to her meal.  The terrible thing was that she could do nothing for him.  She could only wait and watch.  The nurse came back in half an hour, and they sat there together, all the afternoon, one on each side of the bed, waiting and watching.

Towards evening the doctor, who had come at midnight and in the morning, came again.  He looked at Anne keenly and kindly, and his manner seemed to her to say that there was no hope.  He made experiments.  He brought a lighted candle and held it to the patient’s eyes, and said that the pupils were still contracted.  The nurse said nothing.  She looked at Anne and she looked at the doctor, and when he went away, she made a sign to Anne to keep back while she followed him.  Anne heard them talking together in low voices outside the door, and her heart ached with fear of what he would say to her presently.