"She was right beside me, and I was showing her about the lathe. They'd
told me I could teach her. She was picking it up fast, too. And she
liked it. She liked it--"
The fact that Audrey had liked it broke down his scanty reserve of
restraint. Clayton found himself looking down at her from a great
distance. She was very remote. Clare pulled herself together.
"When the first explosion came it didn't touch us. But I guess she knew
it meant more. She said something about the telephone and getting
help and there'd be more, and she started to run. I just stood there,
watching her run, and waiting. And then the second one came, and--"
Suddenly Clare seemed to disappear altogether. He felt something catch
his arm, and the nurse's voice, very calm and quiet: "Sit down. I'll get you something."
Then he was swallowing a fluid that burned his throat, and Clare was
crying with the sheet drawn to her mouth, and somewhere Audrey-He got up, and the nurse followed him out.
"You might look for the person here," she suggested. "We have had
several brought in."
He was still dazed, but he followed her docilely. Audrey was not there.
He seemed to have known that, too. That there would be a long search,
and hours of agony, and at the end--the one thing he did not know was
what was to be at the end.
All that afternoon he searched, going from hospital to hospital. And at
each one, as he stopped, that curious feeling of inner knowledge told
him she was not there. But the same instinct told him she was not dead.
He would have known it if she was dead. There was no reasoning in it. He
could not reason. But he knew, somehow.
Then, late in the afternoon, he found her. He knew that he had found
her. It was as though, at the entrance of the hospital, some sixth sense
had told him this was right at last. He was quite steady, all at once.
She was here, waiting for him to come. And now he had come, and it would
be all right.
Yet, for a time, it seemed all wrong. She was not conscious, had not
roused since she was brought it. There were white screens around her
bed, and behind them she lay alone. They had braided her hair in two
long dark braids, and there was a bandage on one of her arms. She looked
very young and very tired, but quite peaceful.
His arrival had caused a small stir of excitement, his own prominence,
the disaster with which the country was ringing. But for a few minutes,
before the doctors arrived, he was alone with her behind the screen. It
was like being alone with his dead. Bent over her, his face pressed to
one of her quiet hands, he whispered to her all the little tendernesses,
the aching want of her, that so long he had buried in his heart. Things
he could not have told her, waking, he told her then. It seemed, too,
that she must rouse to them, that she must feel him there beside her,
calling her back. But she did not move.