Bee sat in the dingy café with a cup of slopped coffee in front of her and read the sign on the other side of the road for the hundredth time in the last forty-eight hours. The sign said: MOTORISTS. PLEASE REFRAIN FROM USING YOUR HORN. THIS IS A HOSPITAL. It was only seven o’clock in the morning, but the café opened at six, and there was always at least one other customer having a meal as she sat there. She did not notice them. She just sat with a cup of coffee in front of her and stared at the hospital wall opposite. She was an old inhabitant of the café by now. “Better go out and have a meal,” they would say kindly, and she would cross the road and sit for a little with a cup of coffee in front of her and then go back again.

Her life had narrowed down to this pendulum existence between the hospital and café. She found it difficult to remember a past, and quite impossible to visualise a future. There was only the “now,” a dreary half-world of grey misery. Last night they had given her a cot in one of the sisters’ rooms, and the night before that she had spent in the hospital waiting-room. There were two phrases that they used to her, and they were as sickeningly familiar as the sign on their wall: “No, no change,” they would say, or, “Better go out and get a meal.”

The slatternly girl came and pushed a fresh cup of coffee in front of her and took away the one she had. “That one’s cold,” said the slatternly girl, “and you haven’t even touched it.” The fresh cup was slopped over, too. She was grateful to the slatternly girl but felt outraged by her sympathy. She was enjoying the vicarious drama of her presence in the café, and its implications.

MOTORISTS. PLEASE REFRAIN FROM USING—— She must stop reading that thing. Must look at something else. The blue checked pattern of the plastic tablecloth, perhaps. One, two, three, four, five, six —— Oh, no. Not counting things.

The door opened and Dr. Spence came in, his red hair tumbled and his chin unshaved. He said “Coffee!” to the girl, and slid into the seat beside her.

“Well?” she said.

“Still alive.”

“Conscious?”

“No. But there are better indications. I mean, of a chance of his regaining consciousness, not necessarily of — his living.”

“I see.”

“We know about the skull fracture, but there are no means of telling what other injuries there may be.”

“No.”

“You oughtn’t to be living on cups of coffee. That’s all you’ve been having, isn’t it?”

“She hasn’t been having that,” said the slatternly girl, putting down his full cup. “She just sits and looks at them.”

A wave of weary anger rose in her at the slatternly girl’s appropriation of her concerns.

“Better let me take you downtown and give you a meal.”

“No. No, thank you.”

“The Angel is only a mile away, and you can rest properly there and ——”

“No. No, I can’t go as far away as that. I’ll drink this cup. It’s nice and hot.”

Spence gulped down his coffee and paid for it. He hesitated a moment as if reluctant to leave her. “I have to go back to Clare now. You know I shouldn’t leave him if he wasn’t in good hands, don’t you? They’ll do more for him than I ever could.”

“You’ve done wonders for all of us,” she said. “I shall never forget it.”

Now that she had begun drinking the coffee she went on drinking it, and did not look up when the door opened again. It would not be another message from the hospital already, and nothing had any importance for her that was not a message from the hospital. She was surprised when George Peck sat down beside her.

“Spence told me I should find you here.”

“George!” she said. “What are you doing in Westover at this hour of the morning?”

“I have come to bring you comfort that Simon is dead.”

“Comfort?”

“Yes.”

He took something from an envelope and laid it in front of her on the table. It was weatherworn but recognisable. It was a slender black stylograph with a decoration consisting of a thin yellow spiral.

She looked at it a long time without touching it, then looked up at the Rector.

“Then they have found — it?”

“Yes. It was there. Do you want to talk about it here? Wouldn’t you prefer to go back to the hospital?”

“What difference does it make? They are both just places where one waits.”

“Coffee?” said the slatternly girl, appearing at George’s shoulder.

“No; no, thank you.”

“Righteeo!”

“What — what is there? I mean, what — what is left? What did they find?”

“Just bones, my dear. A skeleton. Under three feet of leaf mould. And some shreds of cloth.”

“And his pen?”

“That was separate,” he said carefully.

“You mean, it — had been — that it had been thrown down after?”

“Not necessarily, but — probably.”

“I see.”

“I don’t know whether you will find it comforting or not — I think it is — but the police surgeon is of the opinion that he was not alive — or perhaps it would be more accurate to say not conscious — when he ——”

“When he was thrown over,” Bee said for him.

“Yes. The nature of the skull injury, I understand, leads him to that conclusion.”

“Yes. Yes, I am glad, of course. He probably knew nothing about it. Just ended quite happy on a summer afternoon.”

“There were some small objects in the cloth. Things that he probably had in his trousers pockets. But the police have kept these. Colonel Smollett gave me this,” he picked up the stylograph and put it back in its envelope, “and asked me to show it you so that you might identify it. What news from the hospital? Spence was driving away when I saw him.”

“None. He is not conscious.”

“I blame myself greatly for that, you know,” the Rector said. “If I had listened with understanding he would not have been driven to this sub r............