His left hand throbbed with unbearable agony.  The room began to spin slowly on its axis.  There was no mist now, or even a shadow, and every sense was abnormally acute.  The objects in the whirling room were phenomenally clear; even a scratch on the front of his chiffonier stood out distinctly.

He could hear a clock ticking, though there was no clock in his room.  Afar was the sound of women sobbing—­two of them.  Above it a strange voice said, distinctly:  “There is not one chance in a thousand of saving his hand.  If I had nurses, I would amputate now, before he recovers consciousness.”

The words struck him with the force of a blow, though he did not fully realise what they meant.  The pain in his left arm and the sickening odour nauseated him.  The cool black shadow drowned the objects in the room and crept upon him stealthily.  Presently he was swaying again, up and down, up and down, in the all-encompassing, all-hiding dark.

So it happened that he did not hear Colonel Kent’s ringing answer:  “You shall not amputate until every great surgeon in the United States has said that it is absolutely necessary.  I leave on the next train, and shall send them and keep on sending until there are no more to send.  Until a man comes who thinks there is a chance of saving it, you are in charge—­after that, it is his case.”

Day by day, a continuous procession came to the big Colonial house.  Allison became accustomed to the weary round of darkness, pain, sickening odours, strange faces, darkness, and so on, endlessly, without pity or pause.

The woman in white had mysteriously vanished.  In her place were two, in blue and white, with queer, unbecoming caps.  They were there one at a time, always; never for more than a few minutes were they together.  When the fierce, hot agony became unendurable for even a moment longer, one of them would lean over him with a bit of shining silver in her hand, and stab him sharply for an instant.  Then, with incredible quickness, came peace.

Once, when two strange men had come together, and had gone into the adjoining room, he caught disconnected fragments of conversation.  “Hypersensitive-impossible—­not much longer—­interesting case.”  He wondered, as he began to sway in the darkness again, what “hypersensitive” meant.  Surely, he used to know.

Still, it did not matter—­nothing mattered now.  In the brief intervals of consciousness, he began to wonder what he had been doing just before this happened, whatever it was.  It took him days to piece out the disconnected memories past the whirling room, the woman in white and the creeping shadows, to the red touring car and Isabel.

His heart throbbed painfully, held though it was by some iron hand, icy cold, in a pitiless clutch.  Weakly, he summoned the blue and white woman who sat in a low chair across his room.  She came quickly, and put her ear very close to his lips that she might hear what he said.