“To—­hope!”

Her hot hands closed on him fiercely.

“You shall hope.  I’ll make you.  Cut out the cancer that is in you, and cut away all that is round it.  Then you’ll have health again.  She never knew how to feel in the great human way.  She was too fond of God ever to care for a man.”

Let that be the epitaph over the tomb in which all his happiness was buried.

In silence he made his decision, and Cynthia Clarke knew it.

The darkness covered them.

* * * * *

Down below in the Villa Hafiz Jimmy was sleeping peacefully, tired by the long ride to and from the forest in the heat.  He had gone to bed very early, almost directly after dinner.  His mother had not advised this.  Perhaps indeed, if she had not been secretly concentrated on herself and her own desires that evening, she would have made Jimmy stay up till at least half-past ten, even though he was “jolly sleepy.”  He had slept for at least two hours in the forest.  She ought to have remembered that, but she had forgotten it, and when, at a quarter to nine, on an enormous yawn, Jimmy had announced that he thought he would “turn in and get between the sheets,” she had almost eagerly acquiesced.  She wanted her boy asleep, soundly asleep that night.  When the clock had struck nine he had already traveled beyond the land of dreams.

The night was intensely hot and airless.  No breath of wind came from the sea.  Drops of perspiration stood on the boy’s forehead as he slept, with nothing over him but a sheet.  He lay on his side, with his face towards the open window and one arm outside the sheet.

People easily fall into habits of sleeping.  Jimmy was accustomed to sleep for about eight hours “on end,” as he put it.  When he had had his eight hours he generally woke up.  If he was not obliged to get up he often went to sleep again after an interval of wakefulness, but he seldom slept for as much as nine hours without waking.

On this night between two o’clock and three it seemed as if a layer of sleep were gently lifted from him.  He sighed, stirred, turned over and began to dream.

He dreamed confusedly about Dion, and there were pain and apprehension in his dream.  In it Dion seemed to be himself and yet not himself, to be near and at the same time remote, to be Jimmy’s friend and yet, in some strange and horrible way, hostile to Jimmy.  No doubt the boy was haunted in his sleep by an obscure phantom bred of that painful impression of the morning, when his friend had suddenly been changed in the pavilion, changed into a tragic figure from which seemed to emanate impalpable things very black and very cold.

In the dream Jimmy’s mother did not appear as an active figure; yet the dreamer seemed somehow to be aware of her, to know faintly that she was involved in unhappy circumstances, that she was the victim of distresses he could not fathom.  And these distresses weighed upon him like a burden, as things weigh upon us in dreams, softly and heavily, and with a sort of cloudy awfulness.  He wanted to strive against them for his mother, but he was held back from action, and Dion seemed to have something to do with this.  It was as if his friend and enemy, Dion Leith, did not wish his mother to be released from unhappiness.