Chapter VI · (continued 2)

"I think he seemed a little better this morning," she said, wistfully.

"Don't be jealous of leaving me," Sylvia begged. "You shall never regret that impulse. Will you take this golden bag with you? I don't want it to adorn a Bulgarian; it was a token to me of love, and it has been a true token. At the end of your journey sell it and give the money to poor Serbians. Will you? And this letter for Captain Hazlewood. Please post it in England. Good-by, my dear, my dear."

Michael's sister took the bag and the letter. In the light of this gray morning her gray eyes were profound lakes of grief.

"I am envying you for the second time," she said. Then she waved her crop and rode quickly away. Sylvia watched her out of sight, thinking what it must have cost that proud sister to make this sacrifice. Her heart ached with a weight of unexpressed gratitude, and yet she could not keep it from beating with a fierce and triumphant gladness when she went up to where Michael was lying and found him alone. The orderly and servants had fled from the fear that clung to Nish like the clouds of this heavy day, and Sylvia, taking his hand, bathed his forehead with a tenderness that she half dreaded to use, so much did it seem a flame that would fan the fever in whose embrace he tossed unconscious of all but a world of shadows.

For a week she stayed beside him, sleeping sometimes with her head against his arm, listening to the somber colloquies of delirium, striving to keep the soul that often in the long trances seemed to flutter disconsolately away from the exhausted body. There was no longer any sound of people in Nish: there was nothing but the guns coming nearer and nearer every hour. Then suddenly the firing ceased: there was a clatter and a splash of cavalry upon the muddy paving-stones. The noise passed. Michael sat up and said:

"Listen!"

She thought he was away upon some adventure of delirium and told him not to worry, but to lie still. He was so emaciated that she asked herself if he could really be living: it was like brushing a cobweb from one's path to make him lie down again. A woman's scream, the thin scream of an old woman, shuddered upon the silence outside; but the noise did not disturb him, and he lay perfectly still with his eyes fixed upon the ceiling. A few minutes later he again sat up in bed.

"Am I mad, or is it Sylvia Scarlett?" he asked.

"Yes, it's Sylvia. You're very ill. You must keep still."

"What an extraordinary thing!" he murmured, seriously, to himself. "I suppose I shall hear all about it to-morrow."

He lay back again without seeming to worry about the problem of her presence; nor did he ask where his sister was. Sylvia remembered her own divine content in the hospital when the fever left her, and she wanted him to lie as long as possible thus. Presently, however, he sat up again and said:

"Listen, Sylvia, I thought I wasn't wrong. Do you hear a kind of whisper in the air?"

She listened to please him, and then upon the silence she heard the sound. From a whisper it grew to a sigh, from a sigh it rose to a rustling of many leaves: it was the Bulgarian army marching into Nish, a procession of silent-footed devils, mysterious, remorseless, innumerable.