“They belonged to one another, Vance, and they shut me out, you see,” Gareth finished.

Vance rose to go then, having, he felt, taken all the punishment he could stand, but seeing him leave Gareth cried out, calling his name over and again so that the brother of the dead man relented and seated himself once more by the bed.

“I was in love with your brother,” Gareth repeated.

Vance bowed his head. Dr. Ulric fidgeted, and signaled to Vance again and again that he rise and leave.

“Where are the nurses?” Dr. Ulric began, perhaps merely to have something to say. “And where is the doctor in charge of this patient?” But in the end he too relapsed into silence, and his thoughts went back once again to the time of Jesse Ference and Ruthanna Elder, and their story which now seemed to him such a simple, naive, pathetic, and clear love idyll compared to the one that was now being concluded with the death of Gareth Vaisey, after the violent passing of Sidney and Roy.

“So you see, Vance,” Gareth’s voice continued, but losing its volume and eloquence, losing gradually its color and tone and emphasis, “I was deceived by Sidney and he was deceived by himself, and the only one who was not deceived was the scissors-­grinder. For he knew if he waited long enough he would have Sidney, that Sidney would come to him, and that is what happened. They shut me out. So I had to shoot them. . . . And yet that only allowed them to lose me for good, didn’t it, and go away after all with one another. . . .”

“I missed the funeral, didn’t I?” Gareth spoke now in a voice nobody could believe was his.

Dr. Ulric had finally summoned back the nurse, but for Vance and not for Gareth, and on his instructions they brought Sidney’s brother a tablet which he swallowed dutifully, indifferently, and for him contemptuously.

“Am I getting the same kind of medication Gareth has been given?” Vance surprised the doctor by inquiring.

“No,” Charles Ulric replied. “Yours was something I have prescribed for you before.”

“On account,” Vance explained, “I would hate to tell outright, like Gareth, all the things that are on my heart and mind . . .”

Without warning, Gareth was silent. The doctor felt his pulse. But the outpouring heart Vance had spoken of still beat on, but less regularly.

Dr. Ulric asked the nurse to call in Irene again.

Irene surprised everybody then by her glacial, almost beatific calm. She had been waiting for this final summons, but she had come in without hope or expectation. Her son had never spoken to her on any of the previous occasions she had entered his sick room. She did not expect therefore to hear his voice addressed to her now.