The dream changed. Mrs. Nevill Tyson was wandering about somewhere alone,
always alone; she was walking over sand, hot like the floor of a furnace,
on and on, a terribly long way, towards something black that lay on the
very edge of the world and was now a cloud, and now a cloak, and now a
dead man.
Two people were talking about her now, and there was no sense in what
they said.
"Is there no hope?" said one.
"None," said the other, "none."
There was a sound of some one crying; it seemed to last a long time, but
it was so faint she could scarcely hear it.
"It is just as well. She would have died in child-birth, or lost her
reason."
The crying sounded very far away.
It ceased. The sand drifted and fell from under her feet; she was sinking
into a whirlpool, sucked down by a great spinning darkness and by an icy
wind. She threw up her arms above her head like a dreamer awaking from
sleep. She had done with fevers and with dreams.
The doctor pushed back the soft fringe of down from her forehead. "Look,"
he said, "it is like the forehead of a child."