Bob slept.  Beulah Sands ceased her calling and with a smile raised her fingers to her lips and softly said, “Hush, my Bob’s asleep.”  Together we held vigil over our sleeping lover and friend, she with the happiness of a child who had no fear of the awakening, I with a silent terror of what should come next.  I had seen one mind wafted to the unknown that day.  Was it to have a companion to cheer and solace it on its far journey to the great beyond?  How long we waited Bob’s awakening I could not tell.  The clock’s hands said an hour; it seemed to me an age.  At last his magnificent physique, his unpoisoned blood and splendid brain pulled him through to his new world of mind and heart torture.  His eyelids lifted.  He looked at me, then at Beulah Sands, with eyes so sad, so awful in their perplexed mournfulness, that I almost wished they had never opened, or had opened to let me see the childlike look that now shone from the girl’s.  His gaze finally rested on her and his lips murmured “Beulah.”

“There, Bob, I thought you would know it was time to wake up.”  She bent over and kissed him on the eyes again and again with the loving ardour a child bestows upon its pets.

He slowly rose to his feet.  I could see from his eyes and the shudder that went over him as he caught sight of the paper on the desk that he was himself; that memory of the happenings of the day had not fled in his sleep.  He rose to his full height, his head went up, and his shoulders back, but only from habit and for an instant.  Then he folded Beulah Sands to his breast and dropped his head upon her shoulder.  He sobbed like a father with the corpse of his child.

“Why, Bob, my Bob, is this the way you treat your Beulah when she’s let you sleep so your beautiful eyes would be pretty for the wedding?  Is this the way to act before this kind man who has come to take us to the church?  Naughty, naughty Bob.”

I looked at her, at Bob, in horror.  I was beginning to realise the absolute deadness of this woman.  From the first look I had known that her mind had fled, but knowledge is not always realisation.  She did not even know who I was.  Her mind was dead to all but the man she loved, the man who through all those long days of her suffering she had silently worshiped.  To all but him she was new-born.

At the sound of “wedding,” “church,” Bob’s head slowly rose from her shoulder.  I saw his decision the instant I caught his eye; I realised the uselessness of opposing it, and, sick at heart and horrified, I listened as he said in a voice now calm and soothing as that of a father to his child, “Yes, Beulah, my darling, I have slept too long.  Bob has been naughty, but we will make up for lost time.  Get your hat and cloak and we’ll hurry to the church or we will be late.”

With a laugh of joy she followed him to the closet where hung the little gray turban and the pretty gray jacket.  He took them from their peg and gave them to her.