Following her resolve to make no fuss, the girl went out.  The police had gone.  The mother-child was putting her little folk to bed; and in the kitchen Felix was arranging the wherewithal to eat.  He made her sit down and kept handing things; watching like a cat to see that she put them in her mouth, in the way from which only Flora had suffered hitherto; he seemed so anxious and unhappy, and so awfully sweet, that Nedda forced herself to swallow what she thought would never go down a dry and choky throat.  He kept coming up and touching her shoulder or forehead.  Once he said: 

“It’s all right, you know, my pet; concussion often takes two days.”

Two days with his eyes like that!  The consolation was not so vivid as Felix might have wished; but she quite understood that he was doing his best to give it.  She suddenly remembered that he had no room to sleep in.  He must use Derek’s.  No!  That, it appeared, was to be for her when she came off duty.  Felix was going to have an all-night sitting in the kitchen.  He had been looking forward to an all-night sitting for many years, and now he had got his chance.  It was a magnificent opportunity—­“without your mother, my dear, to insist on my sleeping.”  And staring at his smile, Nedda thought:  ’He’s like Granny—­he comes out under difficulties.  If only I did!’

The ice arrived by motor-cycle just before her watch began.  It was some comfort to have that definite thing to see to.  How timorous and humble are thoughts in a sick-room, above all when the sick are stretched behind the muffle of unconsciousness, withdrawn from the watcher by half-death!  And yet, for him or her who loves, there is at least the sense of being alone with the loved one, of doing all that can be done; and in some strange way of twining hearts with the exiled spirit.  To Nedda, sitting at his feet, and hardly ever turning eyes away from his still face, it sometimes seemed that the flown spirit was there beside her.  And she saw into his soul in those hours of watching, as one looking into a stream sees the leopard-like dapple of its sand and dark-strewn floor, just reached by sunlight.  She saw all his pride, courage, and impatience, his reserve, and strange unwilling tenderness, as she had never seen them.  And a queer dreadful feeling moved her that in some previous existence she had looked at that face dead on a field of battle, frowning up at the stars.  That was absurd—­there were no previous existences!  Or was it prevision of what would come some day?

When, at half past nine, the light began to fail, she lighted two candles in tall, thin, iron candlesticks beside her.  They burned without flicker, those spires of yellow flame, slowly conquering the dying twilight, till in their soft radiance the room was full of warm dusky shadows, the night outside ever a deeper black.  Two or three times his mother came, looked at him, asked her if she should stay,