Now that woman was out of the way----
And then he saw that she was out of the way indeed. She could not have
fallen without his hearing her fall--how could she?--but she was lying on
the floor in a crumple of clothes and one of her arms was thrown queerly
out from her side as if it did not belong to her body any longer. He stood
looking at her for what seemed one long endless wave of uncounted time and
that firecracker noise he had heard kept echoing and echoing through his
head like the sound of loud steps along a long and empty corridor. Then he
suddenly dropped the pistol and knelt clumsily beside her.
"Rose! Rose!" he started calling huskily, his hands feeling with frantic
awkwardness for her pulse and her heart, as Oliver Crowe ran into the room
through the curtains.
XXXIX
Oliver thought that he had never been quite so sure of anything as he was
that he must be insane. He was insane. Very shortly some heavy person in
uniform would walk into the tidy kitchen where he and Ted were crouching
like moving-picture husbands and remark with a kind smile that the Ahkoond
of Whilom was giving a tea-party in the Mountains of the Moon that
afternoon and that unless Oliver (or, as he was probable better known) St.
Pages:
207
208
209
210
211
212
213
214
215
216
217
218
219
220
221
222
223
224
225
226
227
228
229
230
231