She was afraid of the last hour between night and morning.
She believed that with the end of the night the mysterious stream of life became weaker and almost expired—and she dreaded only that hour and did not want to be left alone.
For the rest she was so brave that I had often to clench my teeth.
I had my bed moved into her room and sat with her when she waked and the desperate imploring look would come in her eyes.
I often thought of the morphia phials in my bag, and would not have hesitated to do it, had she not been so grateful for every new day.
I sat by her and told her anything that came into my head.
She was not allowed to talk much, and liked listening to me while I told her all the things that had ever happened to me.
She enjoyed most to hear stories of my schooldays, and often, after she had had an attack and was sitting, stricken and pale, among the pillows, she would ask me to do a turn imitating one or another of my old schoolmasters.
Gesticulating and blustering, plucking an imaginary red beard, I would roam around the room, delivering myself in a snarling voice of some of the riper plums of schoolmasterly wisdom.
Each day I added new ones to my repertory, and before long Pat was familiar with all the rowdies and ragamuffins of our class, who were forever preparing fresh vexations for the masters.
Once the night nurse arrived, attracted by the sonorous bass of our head master; and, to Pat's delight, it was a long time before I could convince her I had not taken leave of my senses, merely because I was hopping around the room in a pelerine of Pat's and a wideawake hat, reading the laws of the Medes and Persians to a certain Karl Ossage who had been caught secretly sawing the legs of the teacher's desk.
Then slowly the daylight trickled through the window.
The backs of the mountains became knife-sharp, black silhouettes.
The sky behind them began to recede, cold and pale.
The night-lamp on the table faded to pale yellow and Pat laid her wet face in my hands.
"It's over, Robby.
Now I have one more day again."
Antonio brought me his radio.
I connected it to the electric light and the heating, and tried it out with Pat that, night.
It squeaked and quacked and then suddenly out of the scratching a clear, sweet music disentangled itself.
"What's that, darling?" asked Pat.
Antonio had given me a wireless journal as well.
I flipped it open.
"Rome, I believe."
Then almosfc-immediately came the deep, metallic voice of the announcer:
"Radio Roma—Napoli—Firenze—"
I turned farther. A pianoforte solo.
"I don't have to look that up," said I. "That's Beethoven's Waldstein Sonata.
I could play it once—in the days when I still imagined that sometime or other I was going to become a music teacher, or a professor, or a composer even. But that was a long time ago.
I couldn't do it now.
Let's turn on again.
They're not pleasant memories."
A rich contralto, soft and caressing:
"Parlez-moi d'amour—"
"Paris, Pat."
A talk on how to combat red spider.
I turned again.
Advertisements.
A quartet.
"What's that?" asked Pat.
"Prague.
String quartet, Opus 59, Beethoven," I read out.
I waited till the movement ended, then turned again, and 'all at once there was a violin, a marvellous violin.
"That'll be Budapest, Pat.
Gipsy music."
I adjusted the dial accurately.
Full and sweet the melody now floated above the orchestra of cymbals, fiddles and pan pipes.
"Lovely, Pat, eh?"
She was silent.
I turned round.