"Leave it till the morning," I said in the tone one adopts in talking to lunatics and drunken men.
"A few hours won't make any difference," I urged. "You'll start fresher if you have a night's rest to the good."
"Good-bye. You think I'm mad. I'm not. No more than I ever am. But Sylvia wants me, and I must go to her."
He was already halfway across the hall. I balanced the rival claims of Joyce and himself. She at least had a doctor and nurse, and a second nurse was coming in the morning. He had no one.
"Damn you, Seraph!" I said under my breath, and then aloud: "Wait a bit and I'll come too."
"Hurry up then!" he answered chafing visibly at the delay.
I spoke a hurried word to the nurse, took a last look at Joyce, changed my clothes and joined him on the landing.
"Which way first?" I asked, and received the answer I might have expected.
"There was no sound at all within the room. But ... he saw a woman's face.
"He saw it quite clearly for perhaps five seconds, the face rising white from the white column of the throat, the dark and weighty coronal of the hair, the curved lips which alone had any colour, the eyes, deep and troubled, which seemed to hint a prayer for help which they disdained to make--for five seconds, perhaps, the illusion remained, for five seconds the face looked out at him ... lit palely, as it seemed, by its own pallor, and so vanished."
Neither by inclination nor habit am I more blasphemous or foul-mouthed than my neighbour, but I should not relish being ordered a year in Purgatory for every occasion on which I repeated "Damn you, Seraph!" in the course of the following nineteen or twenty hours.
It was nearly midnight when we left Adelphi Terrace, and I had in my own mind fixed one hour as the maximum duration of my patience or willingness to humour a demented neurotic. Thirty minutes out, thirty minutes back, and then the Seraph would go to bed, if I had to keep him covered with my revolver. _En parenthèse_, I wish I could break myself of the habit of carrying loaded firearms by night. In the settled, orderly Old Countries it is unnecessary; in the West it is merely foolish. I should be the richer by the contents of six chambers before I had time to draw on the quick, resourceful child of a Western State.... Nevertheless, my revolver and I are inseparable.