“Tessie,” she said, evenly enough, “that will do.  I have to hurry to Long Island to a base hospital.  Go to that little telephone in the hall—­will you?—­and call my car.”

But the visit was not so easy of execution.  It required two days of red tape and official dispensation before she finally reached the seaside hospital that, by unpleasant coincidence, only a year before had been the resort hotel of more than one dancing orgy.

She thought she would faint when she saw him, jerking herself back with a straining of all her faculties.  The blood seemed to drain away from her body, leaving her ready to sink, and only the watchful and threatening eye of a man nurse sustained her.  He was sitting up in bed, and she would never have recognized in him anything of Gerald except for the shining Scandinavian quality of his hair.  His eyes were not bandaged, but their sockets were dry and bare like the beds of old lakes long since drained.  She had only seen the like in eyeless marble busts.  There were unsuspected cheek bones, pitched now very high in his face, and his neck, rising above the army nightshirt, seemed cruelly long, possibly from thinness.

“Are you Hester?” whispered the man nurse.

She nodded, her tonsils squeezed together in an absolute knot.

“He called for you all through his delirium,” he said, and went out.  She stood at the bedside, trying to keep down the screams from her speech when it should come.  But he was too quick for her.

“Hester,” he said, feeling out.

And in their embrace, her agony melted to tears that choked and seared, beat and scalded her, and all the time it was he who held her with rigid arm, whispered to her, soothed down the sobs which tore through her like the rip of silk, seeming to split her being.

“Now—­now!  Why, Hester!  Now—­now—­now!  Sh-h!  It will be over in a minute.  You mustn’t feel badly.  Come now, is this the way to greet a fellow that’s so darn glad to see you that nothing matters?  Why I can see you, Hester.  Plain as day in your little crispy waist.  Now, now!  You’ll get used to it in a minute.  Now—­now—­”

“I can’t stand it, Gerald!  I can’t!  Can’t!  Kill me, Gerald, but don’t ask me to stand it!”

He stroked down the side of her, lingering at her cheek.

“Sh-h!  Take your time, dear,” he said, with the first furry note in his voice.  “I know it’s hard, but take your time.  You’ll get used to me.  It’s the shock, that’s all.  Sh-h!”

She covered his neck with kisses and scalding tears, her compassion for him racing through her in chills.

“I could tear out my eyes, Gerald, and give them to you.  I could tear out my heart and give it to you.  I’m bursting of pain.  Gerald!  Gerald!”

There was no sense of proportion left her.  She could think only of what her own physical suffering might do in penance.  She would willingly have opened the arteries of her heart and bled for him on the moment.  Her compassion wanted to scream.  She, who had never sacrificed anything, wanted suddenly to bleed at his feet, and prayed to do so on the agonized crest of the moment.