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‘Don’t say any more, dear.’

‘Must explain this, May. Why didn’t I give the money to you … when he was dead?… Because I knew you’d only … give it … to creditors…. I knew you…. That’s straight…. I’ve told you now.’

He lost consciousness again, but for an instant May did not notice it. She was crying, and her tears fell on his face.

Then came a doctor, a little dark man, who explained with calm politeness that he had been out when the messenger first arrived. He took off his coat, hung it up, opened his bag, and proceeded to a minute examination of the patient. His movements were so methodical, and he gave orders to May in a tone so quiet, casual, and ordinary, that she almost lost her sense of the reality of the scene.

‘Yes, yes,’ he said, from time to time, as if to himself; nothing else; not a single enlightening word to May.

‘I’m dying,’ moaned Edward, opening his eyes.

The doctor glanced round at May and winked. That wink, deliberate and humorous, was like an electric shock to her. She could actually feel her heart leap in her breast. If she had not been afraid of the doctor, she would have fainted.

‘You all think you’re dying,’ the doctor remarked in a low, amused tone to the ceiling, as he wiped a pair of scissors, ‘when you’ve been knocked silly, especially if there’s a lot of blood about.’

The door opened.

‘Here’s John, ma’am,’ said the cook, ‘with two more doctors. What am I to do?’

May involuntarily turned towards the door.

‘Don’t you go, Mrs. Norris,’ the little dark man commanded. ‘I want you.’ Then he carelessly scrutinized the elderly servant. ‘Tell ’em they’re too late,’ he said. ‘It’s generally like that when there’s an accident,’ he continued after the housekeeper had gone. ‘First you can’t get a doctor anywhere, and then in half an hour or so we come in crowds. I’ve known seven doctors turn up one after another. But in that affair the man happened to have been killed outright.’

He smiled grimly. In a little while he was snapping his bag.

‘I’ll come in the morning, of course,’ he said, as he wrote on a piece of paper. ‘Have this made up, and give it him in the night if he is wakeful. Keep him warm. You might put a couple of hot-water bags, one on either side of him. You’ve got beef-tea made, you say? That’s right. Let him have as much as he wants. Mr. Norris, you’ll sleep like a top.’

‘But, doctor,’ May inquired the next morning in the hall, after Edward had smiled at a joke, and been informed that he must run down to Bournemouth in a week, ‘have we nothing to fear?’

‘I think not,’ was the measured answer. ‘These affairs nearly always seem much worse than they are. Of course, the immediate upset is tremendous–the disorganization, and all that sort of thing. But Nature’s pretty wonderful. You’ll find your husband will soon get over it. I should say he had a good constitution.’

‘And there will be no permanent effects?’

‘Yes,’ said the doctor, with genial cynicism. ‘There’ll be one permanent effect. Nobody will ever persuade him to ride in a hansom again. If he can’t find a four-wheeler, he’ll walk in future.’

She returned to the bedroom. The man on the bed was Edward Norris once more, in control of himself, risen out of his humiliation. A feeling of thankfulness overwhelmed her for a moment, and she sat down.

‘Well, May?’ he murmured.

‘Well, dear.’

They both realized that what they had been through was a common, daily street accident. The smile of each was self-conscious, apprehensive, insincere.

‘Quite a concert going on next door,’ he said with an affectation of lightness.

It was the Hungarian Rhapsody, impetuous and brilliant as ever. How she hated it now–this symbol of the hurried, unheeding, relentless, hollow gaiety of the world! Yet she longed for the magic fingers of the player, that she, too, might smother grief in such glittering veils!