He was not sure if it was Halo who had completed the sentence, or if it was the echo of his own thought.

Leave Laura Lou? No, of course he couldn't. What nonsense! There was nobody else to look after her. He had chosen to have it so—and it was so. His world had closed in on him again, he was handcuffed and chained to it. He felt like a man in a railway smash who has come suddenly back to consciousness and finds himself pinned down under a dead weight. The sluggish current of reality was forcing itself once more into his veins, and he was faint with agony.

From a long way off he seemed to hear her saying: This mustn't be the end, Vance. Someday …  ?

(Oh, yes—someday!)

"I have been able to help you, haven't I? … and I want, I do so want to go on … "

(What were women made of? He wondered.)

"You'll promise me, won't you?"

(Oh, he'd promise anything, if only a rescue party would come along and hoist up this dead weight off his chest. Couldn't she see what he was suffering …  ?)

"Yes, I'll promise."

(You had to be everlastingly promising things to women … even with your life blood running out of you, they'd make you promise… .)

"Well, good-bye."

"Good-bye, Vance."

He turned to go, and heard a little exclamation behind him. He looked back from the doorway and saw that she had stooped down and was gathering up the sheets of manuscript he had left scattered about the floor.

He came back, stammering: "Here … don't you trouble … I'll do it … " and knelt down on the floor beside her. The pages seemed innumerable; they had fluttered away on all sides, he had to reach out right and left to recover them. One had even flown over the brass fender onto the hearth. Yet in a second they were all gathered up again: there were no normal time measures in this world of fever.

She held out the pages she had put together; his hand touched hers as he took them. Then he turned away and the door shut on him. That was over.

Chapter 6

Vance stood in the street and looked up into the night sky. The star-strewn darkness, though blotched with the city's profaning flare, recalled that other sky he had looked up at from the beach, when he had crept out at dawn from his wife's side.